Before we jump into the impact business acumen has on sales, let’s define it.
What is business acumen?
Business acumen is the keenness and quickness in understanding and dealing with business risks or opportunities in a manner that is likely to result in a good outcome.
Put another way, it’s your ability to optimize financial performance by understanding how all of the individual pieces within an organization work together.
I'm in sales, why does business acumen matter to me?
For sales teams, to achieve your goals it’s essential to realize that a company and partner’s success are connected. So to be the best partner, it’s essential to have a good understanding of not only your own company’s financial drivers but also have a complete understanding of your customers as well.
You need to be able to see the opportunities not only from the perspective of your own company but also from the viewpoint of your customers.
With this knowledge, you will be better equipped to develop ideas for your customers with a complete understanding of their struggles or pain points, making it more likely that your customer will agree to move forward with your proposal.
How to improve business acumen in my sales team?
During our Building Business Acumen for Sales course, we’ll help you to better understand the five business drivers, achieve alignment with key corporate stakeholders, understand how to present ideas to improve investment, and then how to package those ideas and projected financial outcomes into impactful business cases.
By actively participating in this course, you’ll become more proficient in identifying, analyzing, creating, and presenting big growth opportunities to your customers. See how this strategy helped Philips Healthcare!
How Can Your Sales Professionals Benefit from Business Acumen?
Be a partner, not a salesman.
Acumen Learning believes this motto is what drives success in sales. To be the best partner, you need to know what your customer is looking for and what drives success for them. Do you know how your customer makes money? Do you know the financial position of their company? Do you know what their driving factor is for partnering with you?
John Barrows, a well known financial consultant stated:
“In B2B sales, lack of business acumen is like a person without a medical background trying to make a diagnosis (opportunity assessment), identify a disease (pain point), and prescribe the appropriate medicine or therapy (business solution).”
We feel that business acumen is just as essential for business and sales professionals, as a medical degree is for doctors. As much as it is knowing how to sell, it’s also knowing your customers and being an uplifting and beneficial partner to them. Understanding their professional background, industry, company, and even some personal background, will help prepare your team to better align and connect your organization's solutions to your customer's strategic objectives and financial metrics.
Building Business Acumen for Sales
We teach a Building Business Acumen For Sales course that teaches the 5 drivers we believe all companies focus on. Throughout this course, we teach sales professionals how to align their products or services with the roles of individual corporate stakeholders, how to prove the investment, and then teach them how to effectively present and communicate these ideas to help your team achieve financial success. After the course, your sales time will be able to confidently identify, analyze, create and present opportunities to your customers, that will not only help them succeed but also be seen as a trusted partner.
Business Acumen is Key to Sales Success:
"Your job is not to convince everybody that your product is right for them. Not everybody is going to be a fit. It is about finding the right people to partner with and make an equally beneficial relationship...."
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