Awesome presentations #4: Pencil Selling – small efford, big effect

July 21, 2022 | Wolfgang Müller

Pencil selling means that a salesperson illustrates his offer with a pencil during the sales talk. In this way, both sides of the customer’s brain are addressed at the same time: the left half with words, the right half with pictures. Pencil selling is therefore a brain-friendly form of communication that is generally more comprehensible and credible and is better stored in the memory than purely verbal communication.

A large part of humanity understands things more easily and can retain them better if they are underpinned by images.

This is exactly where Pencil Selling comes in, because it accommodates the way our brain works. On the one hand, visually highlighting important aspects for the customer helps him to quickly grasp the relevant information. On the other hand, he can comprehend complex facts much more easily. Because the eye in particular is addressed by the painting, the sales talk takes on a completely different dynamic. This creates an additional opportunity for interaction that involves the customer even more.

Pencil Selling Online

Online, you have the choice of using an external whiteboard. In case of doubt, the whiteboard is too slow, because you have to draw all the standardized elements as well and thus only focus on individualization in the course of the conversation.

The best way consists in a mix of normal presentation and Pencil Selling sections. Prepared documents can be adapted with Pencil Selling elements to the individual needs of the customer. This way, you don’t have to present everything manually from scratch and still develop an individual solution together with the customer.

Pencil Selling should be a seamless integrated part of the presentation system and the results should be able to be saved together with the documents as a PDF.

The ability to respond quickly to detailed questions with suitable documents is also important during pencil selling and this infrastructure should therefore also be available.