Having business acumen training elevates sales teams to be their clients' business partners. HOW TO LAND SALES PITCHES Business Acumen Best Practices WHY CHOOSE US CLIENTS STORIES FAQs ARTICLES OUR TEAM According to Harvard Business Review, executives consider less than 20% of the meetings they have with salespeople to be valuable, and as purchasing decisions are more and more often made by committee, getting buy-in from the C-suite is more important than ever. Here’s the problem- while most salespeople understand the benefits of the products and services they sell, the sales targets they need to reach, and even the sales methodology their team utilizes, they often have a myopic view of business and fall back on pushing products rather than helping customers drive long-term success. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Today’s customers don’t need a sales pitch- they need a partner who can provide long-term solutions to their business challenges, and add value (not just push a product ‘til they’re blue in the face). But, traditional sales training develops traditional salespeople. Even if your team utilizes SPIN Selling, Challenger Sale, MEDDIC, Sandler, or any of the other popular sales methodologies out there, those programs won’t hit the mark if your salespeople don't have the proper foundation in business acumen . The reality is, good salespeople are good businesspeople. What it all boils down to is developing fundamental business skills (like reading and analyzing a balance sheet or P&L statement). It’s shocking how many organizations commit resources and money to teach groups like HR, IT and other individual contributors how the business makes money, but don’t realize that the sales force needs these skills even more. Salespeople need to understand how their customers’ companies make money and how they measure success. They also need to understand what their customers’ challenges are from a business perspective, and the impact of those challenges not only on the company’s bottom line, but on a myriad of other considerations that impact purchasing decisions. Lots of sales organizations consider their sales methodology to be their ‘special sauce,’ but, if you ordered a Big Mac® hamburger, and all you got was a bun and the sauce, you’d be pretty disappointed. It doesn’t matter how tasty your sauce is, the sandwich is incomplete without the foundation (the meat). Consider the following examples of how a business acumen foundation elevates some of the most popular sales methodologies: SPIN selling: If your company uses SPIN, you’ll know that it focuses heavily on identifying a customer’s challenges and enabling them to come to their own solution. But with business acumen as a foundation, SPIN sellers can understand their customers’ root business challenges that impact company performance, and can help customers see how your products and services solve their business challenges and improve the bottom line. Target Account Selling (TAS): Many sales groups use TAS, which sets itself apart from other methodologies by factoring in the customer’s internal politics and the decision-making process stakeholders go through. TAS sellers may understand that a purchasing decision is based on relationships and budgets, and has rippling effects within an organization, but with business acumen as a foundation you and put them in a boardroom full of executives, and they’ll be better able to close the deal because they understand the financial and strategic stories behind those relationships and budgets. MEDDIC: Who doesn’t love a good sales acronym? Those who use MEDDIC like it because it helps sales teams qualify prospects, identify key stakeholders and deliver consistent messages. Or in other words, MEDDIC is all about sharing a common language to help sellers navigate and close complex deals. Another language that we’d argue is even more important to understand is the language of business. MEDDIC sellers who also speak the language of business can have the right conversations at the right time, with the person who will have the most impact on the purchasing decision. Challenger Sale: The Challenger sale focuses on being prescriptive, or ‘challenging’ the buyer by mapping out the customer journey, and actively teaching clients how to avoid common business challenges within their industry. For this methodology to be successful, the salesperson must do a lot of research and really understand the company he or she is working with. A solid foundation in business acumen makes all the difference here, as it gives the sales leader a blueprint for understanding their customers’ industries, and what those common business challenges are. That way, their recommendations become more targeted and relevant. Sandler Selling System: The Sandler Selling System focuses heavily on understanding people and how and why they make purchasing decisions. Sandler sellers with a foundation in business acumen don’t make the mistake of diving so far into the psychology of the person they are selling to, they fail to dive into the reasons the company is making the purchase. Instead, Sandler sellers with business acumen training understand what success looks like, and how the individual’s motivations for the purchase are influenced by the company’s needs, and vice versa. Our firm’s research (‘Seeing the Big Picture,’ Greenleaf, 2012) has found that only one out of 10 understand the key business metrics that are important to their customers. That means that 90% lack the business acumen to hang with executives. What’s more, according to the Association for Talent Development companies spend about $20 billion on sales training each year, but the real question is, is that investment paying off? The special sauce may make a Big Mac® hamburger unique, but it’ll never pass as a hamburger without the foundation (the meat). That’s why business acumen training is an absolute must for sales groups. When sales leaders possess business acumen , they pay attention to how their customers’ businesses make and use money, and see the big picture of their customers’ business challenges without losing sight of the details of the sale. This allows them to communicate within the context of those challenges as they utilize the organization’s sales methodology to develop lasting business partnerships, and win more sales. WHAT BUSINESS ACUMEN? READ WHY BUSINESS ACUMEN? READ ENGAGEMENT APOCALYPSE READ FOCUSING ON THE RIGHT THING READ

Need an exceptional online business acumen training option? Learn about Seeing the Big Picture in this video. Business Acumen Online A world-class business acumen course now available online. Related materials: Company Brochure Case Studies with Team Activities Test Your Business Acumen 300% ROI Case Study I'm interested in everything. Play Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Embed Video Link Copied Youtube Link Play Video Play Video 01:20 Bring Business Acumen Training to Your Company The train-the-trainer Building Business Acumen Essentials program provides three things: Scalability, Cost-effectiveness, and Modular learning. The course follows the content of our best-selling book, Seeing the Big Picture, which teaches you the 5 Business Drivers. Play Video Play Video 04:28 Who is Acumen Learning? Acumen Learning has taught business acumen training around the world for fifteen years, helping people understand their business, the impact of their roles, and change their careers for the better. Play Video Play Video 00:49 Building Business Acumen Essentials | A Train-the-Trainer Solution Our Building Business Acumen® Essentials course equips trainers with the skills to teach the big picture of business, how to align decisions to corporate strategy, and improve engagement among employees. Play Video Play Video 01:44 What Is Business Acumen? What is business acumen, and why is it important to your career? Play Video Play Video 02:49 Virtual Business Acumen Training Our customized Building Business Essentials® course will help any professional from any industry understand the big picture of their business, improve their track record of success, align decisions to corporate strategy, fix present problems and prevent new ones, break down communication barriers, take advantage of opportunities to grow, and much more. Play Video Play Video 01:06 Customized Business Acumen So you may be asking yourself — why is having a customized program around business acumen important as you bring it into your organization or your company? Well we would suggest if you're going through and learning how companies make money in theory, that's a lot different than understanding how your company makes money. It's a lot different than understanding your strategy around improving the money making process. It's also important to understand how you stack up against your competition – how you look in the industry. And so as we customize programs for organizations we get really clear on, not just how companies make money generically, but how your company makes money. What's your strategy going forward? What is your historical performance look like? How does that stack up to the competition? How do you compare to your overall industry? And most importantly, what can you do in your role to impact your company's results? And that can only happen if the conversation is really about your organization and how your company makes money. You might think of it as getting an MBA in your own company. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #financialacumen #financialstrategy #MBA #customizedprogram #competition #results Play Video Play Video 01:00 Business Acumen Online A world-class business acumen course now available online. Play Video Play Video 01:48 Why Sales Professionals Need Business Acumen? Before we jump into the impact business acumen has on sales, let’s define it. 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. 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. 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. ✅ Learn more about what business acumen training can do for your sales team at https://www.acumenlearning.com/sales-training ✅ Get more information on Acumen Learning https://www.acumenlearning.com/ ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more business acumen tips and tricks #businessacumen #businessstrategy #salesstrategy #salestraining #learninganddevelopment #sales Play Video Play Video 01:44 Online Business Acumen Training Business acumen isn’t just about the financial make-up of companies, it’s about understanding the role you play in your business’s success. Where do you fit into your company’s money-making strategy — and how can you take your career to a higher level by becoming a business leader? Hi, I’m Kevin Cope, and I’ve converted my New York Times bestselling book "Seeing the Big Picture" into an online course accessible to everyone. In this course, you’ll learn the fundamental drivers at the foundation of all companies, and gain skills and vocabulary to not just speak, but think like a CEO. We’ll take you through a two-part course that will first build your foundation with the 5 Business Drivers, and then teach you how to use financial statements so you can discover the trajectory of any company — and receive professional credits on completion. You’ll receive tools and resources you can continually use throughout your career, like the Executive Alignment tool, Quarterly Earnings Call workbook, Action Plan, and more. You’ll also get twelve lessons so you can take your team through a year’s worth of case study activities to expand their business acumen. And finally, you’ll have access to a catalog of earnings call labs where one of our senior financial consultants will teach you how to listen to earnings calls by breaking down Fortune 500 companies’ numbers. Business acumen training is for everyone. Whether you’re a job seeker, entrepreneur, professional, or looking for a customized version of the course for your team, it’s never a bad time to further your career. Today’s the day — get year-long access to SeeingTheBigPicture.com and take charge of your career. I’ll see you in the course. ✅ Visit https://www.seeingthebigpicture.com/ to get access to the online course! (Oh, and we offer discounts for military personnel + their family members, veterans, and students.) ✅ For a copy of "Seeing the Big Picture" visit https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Big-Picture-Business-Credibility/dp/1608322467 ✅ To learn more about us and our online training programs visit https://www.acumenlearning.com/ #businessacumen #businessstrategy #financialacumen #financialstrategy #learninganddevelopment #HR #leadershipdevelopment #training #onlinetraining Play Video Play Video 01:14 A Different Kind of Virtual Training We don’t want you to feel like checking your email is a better use of your time than participating in a poorly taught training. That’s why we’ve made a virtual class that’s as much a discussion for you and your peers as it is instruction for your career. Play Video Play Video 02:20 Business Acumen Training at Waste Connections Hear from Waste Connection's leadership on the impact of Acumen Learning's business acumen training. Play Video Play Video 01:06 What is the meaning of business acumen? We get asked a lot about how we define business acumen, so we're here to quickly answer that! Business acumen is a competency that a lot of companies measure their employees on. We would define it as really understanding the fundamental money-making process of your company, and then making sure that your priorities and strategies align with that money-making process. Regardless of the size of the company and the industry, the business acumen fundamentals are the same, and it's important that everyone within the organization understands those fundamentals. If you're a new employee, understanding what you do every day that fits into the bigger picture is really important and brings meaning to your role. Understanding the broader business realities of the organization, allows you to start to put into context what you do every day and the economic value and contribution you bring to the company. It starts to bring some meaning and context perspective to what you do every day in a way that allows you to get excited about what you do every day. ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit: https://www.acumenlearning.com/ #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #financialacumen #financialstrategy Play Video Play Video 01:39 Building Business Acumen for Sales Outperform everyone. You need your sales and marketing team to deliver profitable results. Yet most buyers are fed up, tired of reps who don't understand what's driving their business. Building Business Acumen training (BBA) helps sales and marketing teams understand how all the moving parts of a company work together to optimize profitable results for your company and customers. Your customized Building Business Acumen sales and marketing course will establish your team as essential partners to your customers. They'll learn what to listen for, which questions to ask, and how to decipher tricky financial information and ever-changing strategies to win business. Play Video Play Video 01:59 Getting Hired With Business Acumen If you're looking to get a job and to exude business acumen in your interview, you'll want to know how the company generates money. What products does it have? What customers does it sell to? Where does it operate? Is it growing or not? How profitable is the company? You'll want to know all those things before you go into the interview to then be able to connect the role that you're interviewing for and how that will ultimately contribute to the company's success in the future. They're not just hiring you just to do the job — although that's going to be important. They’re hiring you to link your job and contribute to the company's success moving forward. Being able to make that linkage point in the interviews on how this role fits to the fundamental direction of the company and its financial performance gives you a much higher likelihood to be hired. They don't just see you as a functional person who understand the functional domain well, but as a part of the bigger picture of the organization’s success. Go to their investor relations website and get a feel for what are the latest messages, latest trends, strategies, and what the company is communicating broadly. You'll also want to understand what its top financial metrics are that they look at to measure success. You'll want to be able to understand not only where the company is now in its performance, but where it's trying to go. As you understand more on where the company is going, you can better position your role and your skills — and then better contribute to the future trends of the company. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #HR #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen #hired #lookingforwork #interview Play Video Play Video 03:15 Why Business Acumen is Essential for Healthcare Business acumen and healthcare aren’t something that we necessarily think about in the same sentence…but they SHOULD be. Acumen Learning’s President, Ben Cook has worked with different facets of the healthcare industry for years, and in this video, he highlights why it’s important that your team has great business acumen. The world of healthcare is complex. And each part of the industry has a different set of priorities they need to focus on in order to succeed. The pharmaceutical and medical device portions of the industry focus on getting innovations to market to drive patient outcomes. Providers focus on operational efficiencies while driving patient impact. The insurance portion of the industry focuses on member advocacy, operational efficiency, and risk management. Regardless of where you are at in the healthcare industry, there is a deep need for better business acumen. Understanding how your organization makes money, how that money is used to further your mission and success, and what each person can do to further impact your organization and your customers is progressively getting more vital given the interdependency of the industry’s constituent parts, the complexity of the regulatory environment, and the global nature of competition and patients’ needs. Competency is now more vital than ever to your success as a leader and as an organization. Play Video Play Video 01:13 Why Business Acumen Should Matter to Everyone So, why does business acumen matter to an organization? Well, I’d suggest that companies don’t improve performance simply because the CEO says that it should. It happens because individuals throughout the organization make really good business decisions. And that only happens when individuals throughout the organization understand how the company makes money. And in their role, they make the right kind of decisions. Decisions that are not only good for them and their department, but also good for the company. Individuals want to know how they matter, how they make a difference, and how they fit in with their organization. In other words, they want that line of sight between their role and the decisions they make, and how it impacts an organization's results. So, people they want to matter, they want to fit in, and I’ve often thought this quote is really relevant around this idea: people work hard for a paycheck, harder for a person, and hardest for a purpose. So, if you really want people’s hearts and minds, their innovation, their mindshare, then help them understand their role in the organization improving company results. It really gives them a sense of how they fit in, and how they matter to the organization. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #HR #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen Play Video Play Video 01:20 We Have an Impact Hear from participants of our course on how business acumen training helped them to see the bigger picture of their company. Play Video Play Video 01:44 Why Business Acumen is Essential for IT Teams I’m sure your CIOs and IT leaders are some of the best when it comes to technical know-how but that’s no longer enough if you want to optimize your team in creating growth. Now is the time to optimize IT operational efficiency to drive business value and strategic agility. Hi, I’m Jeff Cope, a Senior Financial Consultant at Acumen Learning, and I’ve had the opportunity to train some of the top technology companies business acumen. When you think IT, you think optimization and performance, but there’s a missed opportunity if companies don’t leverage the talent of their employees in improving the vision, strategy, and action of IT in business outcomes. Imagine what you could accomplish if your teams understood how they fit into the overall strategy of your business. Your IT teams aren’t just support. They’re a critical component — and really backbone — of your company’s success. Why shouldn’t they also be intimately familiar with its big picture? And leveraged in shifting your company towards its goals? With business acumen, your team will better understand how to speak the language of business, allowing them to see how their decisions and ideas will impact the entire company. Not only will this training impact their decision making ability, but it will also allow them to be more effective at presenting meaningful ideas and opportunities at the leadership level. And who doesn’t need more of that in their company?

When we began this endeavor over a decade ago, it was to meet a severe need to develop business acumen among rank and file front line employees… so we thought. DO WE CATER TO ALL CAREER STAGES? FAQs WHY CHOOSE US CLIENTS STORIES FAQs ARTICLES OUR TEAM STRENGTHENING YOUR ORGANIZATION AT EVERY CAREER STAGE WITH BUSINESS ACUMEN TRAINING When we began this endeavor over a decade ago, it was to meet a severe need to develop business acumen among rank and file front line employees… so we thought. We learned quickly that business acumen is a gap for most professionals including people in senior leadership positions. Even so called "numbers people" who can read a financial statement have a hard time connecting those numbers to the projects, decisions, departments, external factors, and innovations that are the real story behind the numbers. So while we conduct a lot of frontline courses, we teach just as much business acumen training to senior leaders and finance groups. Business acumen training helps your Frontline employees… Seek and review data and information to make decisions that maximizes their performance. Make use of company resources, including financial statements, to expand their business knowledge. Use insights from data to adjust their priorities. Demonstrate an understanding of the commercial, operational, financial, and people aspects of the business. Business acumen training helps your High Potentials… Bring together various data sources and identify patterns within the data to make effective decisions aligned with functional goals. Demonstrate an understanding of the interrelationships between functions. Adapt tactics to changing business priorities across the organization and regions. Effectively manage budgets and financial controls. Business acumen training helps your Senior Leaders… Translate vast amounts of data from various sources to make decisions on current situations and future opportunities or obstacles. Combine their knowledge of the business with industry and marketplace knowledge to drive organizational performance. Monitor financial performance measures and ensure finance controls and targets are met. Is able to be decisive using ambiguous data. Start a Conversation

We have business acumen training experience with all levels and functions within healthcare. Business Acumen for Healthcare Providers | Payors | Med-device | Pharma | Biotech | PBMs | Distributors Balancing healthcare and the business of healthcare The world of healthcare is complex. And each part of the industry has a different set of priorities they need to focus on in order to succeed. The pharmaceutical and medical device portions of the industry focus on getting innovations to market to drive patient outcomes. Providers focus on operational efficiencies while driving patient impact. The insurance portion of the industry focuses on member advocacy, operational efficiency, and risk management. Regardless of where you are at in the healthcare industry, there is a deep need for better business acumen. Understanding how your organization makes money, how that money is used to further your mission and success, and what each person can do to further impact your organization and your customers is progressively getting more vital given the interdependency of the industry’s constituent parts, the complexity of the regulatory environment, and the global nature of competition and patients’ needs. Competency is now more vital than ever to your success as a leader and as an organization. Get the healthcare overview "I would highly recommend this training. The presenters were amazing, easy to follow, and quite engaging. The content was clear and relevant. The course was modified to meet our unique business need and I'm pleased with what was delivered. Great job!" Senior Director Aetna Start a Conversation Experience Healthcare experience includes work with… 17 of the top 50 Fortune 500 Healthcare Companies 7 of the 10 Biggest Pharma Companies 8 of the 10 Biggest Med-Device Companies Philips Healthcare With business acumen training, Acumen Learning helped teach top sales reps how to speak the language of the executive suite. View Press Release Acumen Learning Continues Partnership with Leading Eye Care Company to Develop Business Acumen For the last 16 years, Acumen Learning has provided business and financial acumen training for global directors of the largest medical eye care company in the world. View Press Release Top 5 Largest Pharmaceutical Company in the World Expands Partnership with Acumen Learning Acumen Learning has expanded its partnership with one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world to develop business acumen. View Press Release Outcomes Healthcare leaders engage us to improve Executive Alignment Know the strategic direction of your organization in order to align your priorities accordingly to enable optimal impact. Leadership Understand and effectively communicate where your organization is going and how it is doing to connect your employees’ roles to your organization’s success. Analytical Skills Increase your fluency of the metrics most vital to measure organizational and financial success and the key levers to pull to move the needle. Decision Making Make better, smarter, faster decisions that will drive impact and organizational success since every organization needs more employees at all levels to think like business people. Communication Drive better alignment and clarity of direction with the decisions you make with the organizations you lead or support. Do this by speaking the language of business and finance. Start a Conversation Explore more... Earnings Call Labs Join one of our free monthly labs and learn how to listen to earnings calls by breaking down Fortune 500 companies like AstraZeneca and UnitedHealth. View Full Schedule 300% ROI Their analysis demonstrated that business acumen training more than paid for itself with a 300%+ ROI. Read Case Study Articles Read up on the latest articles on business acumen and news about Acumen Learning. Read Articles "Excellent eye opener! I learned so much about how the key metrics impact our primary drivers and strategy. Gained insight into how the metrics get impacted due to different business moves, decisions and strategies, especially comparing different companies." Software Engineering Senior Manager Cigna

Business acumen training made specifically to help your sales team have meaningful conversations with clients about strategy needs. Building Business Acumen® for Sales Outperform everyone. You need your sales team to deliver profitable results. Yet most buyers are fed up, tired of reps who don't understand what's driving their business. Building Business Acumen training (BBA) helps sales teams understand how all the moving parts of a company work together to optimize profitable results for your company and customers. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Accelerate sales cycles Achieve alignment Increase margins Did you know… Only 20% of salespeople are successful in reaching executives' expectations and creating value. And if that's not bad enough... Go do some homework. Studies show that 64% of reps don't understand your industry, 76% don't understand your business, and 78% don't know how to help you. Uh, that's pretty bad! ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Your solution awaits... Building Business Acumen Your customized Building Business Acumen sales course will establish your team as essential partners to your customers. They'll learn what to listen for, which questions to ask, and how to decipher tricky financial information and ever-changing strategies to win business. Understand key business drivers and financial statements Understand how to iterate ideas to improve the return of investment Achieve alignment with key stakeholders Package ideas and their financial outcomes into well-structured business cases In the end, your team will leverage their business acumen and be revered for their growth ideas and their ability to help customers succeed. Develop business savvy representatives… As easy as 1, 2, boom! A great strength of Acumen Learning is that we customize our content to every individual client and to each audience. That means, at a minimum, we use your financial statements, and your customers', to teach strategy, finance, and business acumen in your company's voice, and we use the exercises that you choose to ensure direct application of the concepts in each participant’s role. And it's a process that can be measured in weeks, not months. Boom! Part I The 5 Business Drivers Your customers are making business decisions, driving toward their goals, and measuring financial results using 5 business drivers. Leveraging these drivers will speed up your sales cycle. Part II Navigating Numbers The 5 Business Drivers are present in any company’s financial statements. This gives them real-world applicability, so that you can quickly move from the “What?” to the “So What?” to the “Now What?” Part III Acumen in Action You'll get tools, activities, and follow-up resources to help you leverage company and industry data, take the lead on opportunities, and apply your new skills... not just once... but throughout your sales career. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Hear from participants... Forward-thinking sales teams across every industry rely on Acumen Learning to transform their people into out-performers. Marouene Makhloufi • 3rd+ Sales Engineer This training gave me the financial and business depth to analyze and improve my daily sales performance. As a Sales specialist, mastering the business context of a customer/prospect is key to progress in the sales cycle but also close maximized business oppys. Mike Danielson • 2nd Consultant and B2B Sales I was very fortunate to take a snapshot version of this course last summer through my previous company. After 1 day I was hooked. I was a sales manager for a 15 rep team and was a slow starter to understanding the ins and outs of business acumen. This class propelled me on my quest to learn more. I have read Kevin’s book 2x now and I am working on bringing his training course to my new team and company some time this year. I highly recommend this course and book to all up and coming leaders in business. We know your customers… Our consultants have worked directly with over 200 different companies and have conducted research on all of their top competitors. This gives them an unparalleled perspective into a wide range of industries. What are the main strategies for driving growth in retail? How are hospitals navigating new industry regulations? Who’s leading in the energy sector? We know the answers to these questions and more, and we’ll give your sales teams the tools they need to become similarly sophisticated. Traditional sales training = traditional selling When clients start to open up and share information, it’s usually information about their business. Too frequently, key metrics and strategic challenges sound more like Latin to salespeople than English. So to avoid looking like the only person in the room who’s not tracking, salespeople with low business acumen turn the conversation to something that’s more comfortable to talk about: their solution’s features and benefits, or worse: golf. And when the sale is lost, you’re left wondering why your investment in sales training can’t seem to break free of industrial-era tactics. Too often companies emphasize soft skills, like negotiation and resolving objections — skills that focus on how to talk to customers — but neglect developing business acumen. Say it ain't so! Unfortunately, it's true. Business acumen is the ultimate skill. Reps who speak the language of business outperform their peers, they instinctively know when to talk to customers, why to talk to customers, and what to talk to customers about. Customers want a partner, not a pitch… Today’s customers want to do business with people who are more consultative and savvier when it comes to business. Someone who can help them see the path forward. A partner who brings actionable, data-driven recommendations to the table. In other words, your best customers don't want to talk with salespeople, they want to talk to business people who just so happen to be in sales. As such, your training will have a particular focus on customer and industry analysis. Participants will be taught how to quickly analyze a customer from a strategic and financial perspective and size up a business opportunity to make sure it's profitable for both. They’ll see, likely for the first time, how your company's success is intertwined with your customers' success which will help them develop account strategies based on insights, trends, and priorities. Further, representatives will learn how to look at their deals through the lens of decision-makers in different functional roles and advise them on the impact their purchases will have on their own KPIs and strategic priorities. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Tired of reading? Play Video Play Video 01:39 Play Video Play Video 06:03 Play Video Play Video 02:26 Play Video Play Video 03:53 Play Video Play Video 03:10 Play Video Play Video 04:40 Explore more… CareerBuilder Learning to diagnose business issues helped sales leaders and agents diversify revenue streams beyond job postings for business-savvy sales. Read Case Study Philips Healthcare With increasing pressure to get costs out of the system, we taught Philips Healthcare's top sales reps how to speak the language of the executive suite. Read Case Study How to Land Your Sales Pitches While most salespeople understand the benefits of the products and services they sell, they often have a myopic view of business and how to help customers. Read Article Let's start a conversation. We love hearing from you. Let us know how we can help. Contact Us

Acumen Learning's business acumen training content. < back Business Acumen Training Content

Business acumen training that reaches your audiences anywhere, improving their understanding of your business and their impact. Virtual Training: Building Business Acumen® for Reach everyone. Whether working from home or at the office, business acumen training can be a part of your workforce's curriculum. Since 2010, Acumen Learning has been pioneering virtual instructor-led courses, and there's no time like the present to teach your employees what executives need them to know and do. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Global Reach & Inclusivity Budget Friendly Highly Interactive Did you know… 72% of executives report their companies adopting permanent remote-working arrangements. And if that's not compelling enough... Nearly 40% of the workforce in the United States has the potential to work from anywhere. It's expected that there will be a 20% reduction in corporate travel spending by 2023. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Your solution awaits... Virtual Building Business Acumen Virtual Instructor-Led Training replicates our customized classroom experience. Your customized Building Business Acumen virtual course will teach your employees wherever they are to be smarter business leaders without compromising on quality. Understand key business drivers and financial statements Align your individual and team decisions with executive initiatives Evaluate trade-offs between competing options or decisions Make bolder and faster business decisions In the end, any professional, from any department, will understand the business of your business. Download the Executive Overview Submit Download now Develop employees who are experts in your business… As easy as 1, 2, boom! A great strength of Acumen Learning is that we customize our content to every individual client and to each audience. That means, at a minimum, we use your financial statements to teach strategy, finance, and business acumen in your company's voice, and we use the exercises that you choose to ensure direct application of the concepts in each participant’s role. And it's a process that can be measured in weeks, not months. Boom! Step I Choose Your Virtual Offering We can customize our deliveries to best suit your needs. We can teach over multiple days or in 4-hour chunks, or create a blended solution. Step II Customize Your Course Together we'll customize your course to cover the concepts, key metrics, and strategies that are important to your CEO. Step III Schedule Your Course Let's have a conversation about how our virtual business acumen training course can help your corporation. Reach us at 801-224-5444. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Hear from participants... You're in good company. Todd Harrison, Ed.D. • 2nd Director, Global Organizational Effectiveness and Talent Kevin and the Acumen Learning team deliver the absolute best business acumen training on the market. In a former company where I worked, even the Finance and Accounting folks said they learned a lot from the session. It is worth the time to check out what Acumen Learning has to offer. DeWayne Addison • 2nd Enterprise Account Executive Kevin and team did an outstanding job with us for the Business Acumen training. Very insightful and at a good pace. During these pandemic times, we did it virtually and it went off without a hitch. Highly recommended and thanks to Kevin again! We know your industry… Our consultants have worked directly with over 200 different companies and have conducted research on all of their top competitors. This gives them an unparalleled perspective into a wide range of industries. What are the main strategies for driving growth in retail? How are hospitals navigating new industry regulations? Who’s leading in the energy sector? We know the answers to these questions and more, and we’ll give your teams information specific to your business and partners' needs. Do your employees understand the business of your business? While most people understand their job, only one out of ten understand metrics that are important to their CEO, and 95% don’t understand their company’s strategy. You end up with employees who are more interested in only getting their work done than in seeing how their work contributes to the bottom line. But when employees have business acumen, productivity accelerates, engagement improves, and solutions come together as individuals, teams, and executives align around common objectives. Customers want a partner, not a pitch… CEOs need employees who aren't just great at their role but exceptional business leaders. Someone who can help them along the path forward. A business leader who make strategic, data-driven actions. In other words, your CEOs wants to have business people who just so happen to be in HR or IT or Engineering. As such, your training will have a particular focus on executive needs. Participants will be taught how to quickly analyze your company's communications from a strategic and financial perspective and create action items around that strategy. ⇲ Download the Executive Overview Tired of reading? Play Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Link Copied Explore more… Earnings Call Webinars We host a free webinar every month where we breakdown a top company's earnings call. Join us and learn how to interpret any company's strategy. View Webinar Schedule Philips Healthcare With increasing pressure to get costs out of the system, we taught Philips Healthcare's top sales reps how to speak the language of the executive suite. Read Case Study Articles What's the difference between cash and cash flow? What financial questions do you need to know for an interview? What's up with Bitcoin? Get answers for this and more in our articles. Read Articles Let's start a conversation. We love hearing from you. Let us know how we can help. Contact Us

Log into your graduate portal, Acumen in Action, or back into your online learning experience, Seeing the Big Picture. Login For Your Business Acumen Experience Graduate Portal | Acumen in Action Online Learning | Seeing the Big Piture

Who is Acumen Learning? Learn more in this video. Who is Acumen Learning? Related materials: Company Brochure Case Studies with Team Activities Test Your Business Acumen 300% ROI Case Study I'm interested in everything. Acumen Learning has taught business acumen training around the world for 22 years, helping people understand their business, and the impact of their roles, and change their careers for the better. Play Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Embed Video Link Copied Play Video Play Video 01:20 Bring Business Acumen Training to Your Company The train-the-trainer Building Business Acumen Essentials program provides three things: Scalability, Cost-effectiveness, and Modular learning. The course follows the content of our best-selling book, Seeing the Big Picture, which teaches you the 5 Business Drivers. Play Video Play Video 04:28 Who is Acumen Learning? Acumen Learning has taught business acumen training around the world for fifteen years, helping people understand their business, the impact of their roles, and change their careers for the better. Play Video Play Video 00:49 Building Business Acumen Essentials | A Train-the-Trainer Solution Our Building Business Acumen® Essentials course equips trainers with the skills to teach the big picture of business, how to align decisions to corporate strategy, and improve engagement among employees. Play Video Play Video 01:44 What Is Business Acumen? What is business acumen, and why is it important to your career? Play Video Play Video 02:49 Virtual Business Acumen Training Our customized Building Business Essentials® course will help any professional from any industry understand the big picture of their business, improve their track record of success, align decisions to corporate strategy, fix present problems and prevent new ones, break down communication barriers, take advantage of opportunities to grow, and much more. Play Video Play Video 01:06 Customized Business Acumen So you may be asking yourself — why is having a customized program around business acumen important as you bring it into your organization or your company? Well we would suggest if you're going through and learning how companies make money in theory, that's a lot different than understanding how your company makes money. It's a lot different than understanding your strategy around improving the money making process. It's also important to understand how you stack up against your competition – how you look in the industry. And so as we customize programs for organizations we get really clear on, not just how companies make money generically, but how your company makes money. What's your strategy going forward? What is your historical performance look like? How does that stack up to the competition? How do you compare to your overall industry? And most importantly, what can you do in your role to impact your company's results? And that can only happen if the conversation is really about your organization and how your company makes money. You might think of it as getting an MBA in your own company. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #financialacumen #financialstrategy #MBA #customizedprogram #competition #results Play Video Play Video 01:00 Business Acumen Online A world-class business acumen course now available online. Play Video Play Video 01:48 Why Sales Professionals Need Business Acumen? Before we jump into the impact business acumen has on sales, let’s define it. 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. 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. 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. ✅ Learn more about what business acumen training can do for your sales team at https://www.acumenlearning.com/sales-training ✅ Get more information on Acumen Learning https://www.acumenlearning.com/ ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more business acumen tips and tricks #businessacumen #businessstrategy #salesstrategy #salestraining #learninganddevelopment #sales Play Video Play Video 01:44 Online Business Acumen Training Business acumen isn’t just about the financial make-up of companies, it’s about understanding the role you play in your business’s success. Where do you fit into your company’s money-making strategy — and how can you take your career to a higher level by becoming a business leader? Hi, I’m Kevin Cope, and I’ve converted my New York Times bestselling book "Seeing the Big Picture" into an online course accessible to everyone. In this course, you’ll learn the fundamental drivers at the foundation of all companies, and gain skills and vocabulary to not just speak, but think like a CEO. We’ll take you through a two-part course that will first build your foundation with the 5 Business Drivers, and then teach you how to use financial statements so you can discover the trajectory of any company — and receive professional credits on completion. You’ll receive tools and resources you can continually use throughout your career, like the Executive Alignment tool, Quarterly Earnings Call workbook, Action Plan, and more. You’ll also get twelve lessons so you can take your team through a year’s worth of case study activities to expand their business acumen. And finally, you’ll have access to a catalog of earnings call labs where one of our senior financial consultants will teach you how to listen to earnings calls by breaking down Fortune 500 companies’ numbers. Business acumen training is for everyone. Whether you’re a job seeker, entrepreneur, professional, or looking for a customized version of the course for your team, it’s never a bad time to further your career. Today’s the day — get year-long access to SeeingTheBigPicture.com and take charge of your career. I’ll see you in the course. ✅ Visit https://www.seeingthebigpicture.com/ to get access to the online course! (Oh, and we offer discounts for military personnel + their family members, veterans, and students.) ✅ For a copy of "Seeing the Big Picture" visit https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Big-Picture-Business-Credibility/dp/1608322467 ✅ To learn more about us and our online training programs visit https://www.acumenlearning.com/ #businessacumen #businessstrategy #financialacumen #financialstrategy #learninganddevelopment #HR #leadershipdevelopment #training #onlinetraining Play Video Play Video 01:14 A Different Kind of Virtual Training We don’t want you to feel like checking your email is a better use of your time than participating in a poorly taught training. That’s why we’ve made a virtual class that’s as much a discussion for you and your peers as it is instruction for your career. Play Video Play Video 02:20 Business Acumen Training at Waste Connections Hear from Waste Connection's leadership on the impact of Acumen Learning's business acumen training. Play Video Play Video 01:06 What is the meaning of business acumen? We get asked a lot about how we define business acumen, so we're here to quickly answer that! Business acumen is a competency that a lot of companies measure their employees on. We would define it as really understanding the fundamental money-making process of your company, and then making sure that your priorities and strategies align with that money-making process. Regardless of the size of the company and the industry, the business acumen fundamentals are the same, and it's important that everyone within the organization understands those fundamentals. If you're a new employee, understanding what you do every day that fits into the bigger picture is really important and brings meaning to your role. Understanding the broader business realities of the organization, allows you to start to put into context what you do every day and the economic value and contribution you bring to the company. It starts to bring some meaning and context perspective to what you do every day in a way that allows you to get excited about what you do every day. ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit: https://www.acumenlearning.com/ #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #financialacumen #financialstrategy Play Video Play Video 01:39 Building Business Acumen for Sales Outperform everyone. You need your sales and marketing team to deliver profitable results. Yet most buyers are fed up, tired of reps who don't understand what's driving their business. Building Business Acumen training (BBA) helps sales and marketing teams understand how all the moving parts of a company work together to optimize profitable results for your company and customers. Your customized Building Business Acumen sales and marketing course will establish your team as essential partners to your customers. They'll learn what to listen for, which questions to ask, and how to decipher tricky financial information and ever-changing strategies to win business. Play Video Play Video 01:59 Getting Hired With Business Acumen If you're looking to get a job and to exude business acumen in your interview, you'll want to know how the company generates money. What products does it have? What customers does it sell to? Where does it operate? Is it growing or not? How profitable is the company? You'll want to know all those things before you go into the interview to then be able to connect the role that you're interviewing for and how that will ultimately contribute to the company's success in the future. They're not just hiring you just to do the job — although that's going to be important. They’re hiring you to link your job and contribute to the company's success moving forward. Being able to make that linkage point in the interviews on how this role fits to the fundamental direction of the company and its financial performance gives you a much higher likelihood to be hired. They don't just see you as a functional person who understand the functional domain well, but as a part of the bigger picture of the organization’s success. Go to their investor relations website and get a feel for what are the latest messages, latest trends, strategies, and what the company is communicating broadly. You'll also want to understand what its top financial metrics are that they look at to measure success. You'll want to be able to understand not only where the company is now in its performance, but where it's trying to go. As you understand more on where the company is going, you can better position your role and your skills — and then better contribute to the future trends of the company. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #HR #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen #hired #lookingforwork #interview Play Video Play Video 03:15 Why Business Acumen is Essential for Healthcare Business acumen and healthcare aren’t something that we necessarily think about in the same sentence…but they SHOULD be. Acumen Learning’s President, Ben Cook has worked with different facets of the healthcare industry for years, and in this video, he highlights why it’s important that your team has great business acumen. The world of healthcare is complex. And each part of the industry has a different set of priorities they need to focus on in order to succeed. The pharmaceutical and medical device portions of the industry focus on getting innovations to market to drive patient outcomes. Providers focus on operational efficiencies while driving patient impact. The insurance portion of the industry focuses on member advocacy, operational efficiency, and risk management. Regardless of where you are at in the healthcare industry, there is a deep need for better business acumen. Understanding how your organization makes money, how that money is used to further your mission and success, and what each person can do to further impact your organization and your customers is progressively getting more vital given the interdependency of the industry’s constituent parts, the complexity of the regulatory environment, and the global nature of competition and patients’ needs. Competency is now more vital than ever to your success as a leader and as an organization. Play Video Play Video 01:13 Why Business Acumen Should Matter to Everyone So, why does business acumen matter to an organization? Well, I’d suggest that companies don’t improve performance simply because the CEO says that it should. It happens because individuals throughout the organization make really good business decisions. And that only happens when individuals throughout the organization understand how the company makes money. And in their role, they make the right kind of decisions. Decisions that are not only good for them and their department, but also good for the company. Individuals want to know how they matter, how they make a difference, and how they fit in with their organization. In other words, they want that line of sight between their role and the decisions they make, and how it impacts an organization's results. So, people they want to matter, they want to fit in, and I’ve often thought this quote is really relevant around this idea: people work hard for a paycheck, harder for a person, and hardest for a purpose. So, if you really want people’s hearts and minds, their innovation, their mindshare, then help them understand their role in the organization improving company results. It really gives them a sense of how they fit in, and how they matter to the organization. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #HR #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen Play Video Play Video 01:20 We Have an Impact Hear from participants of our course on how business acumen training helped them to see the bigger picture of their company. Play Video Play Video 01:44 Why Business Acumen is Essential for IT Teams I’m sure your CIOs and IT leaders are some of the best when it comes to technical know-how but that’s no longer enough if you want to optimize your team in creating growth. Now is the time to optimize IT operational efficiency to drive business value and strategic agility. Hi, I’m Jeff Cope, a Senior Financial Consultant at Acumen Learning, and I’ve had the opportunity to train some of the top technology companies business acumen. When you think IT, you think optimization and performance, but there’s a missed opportunity if companies don’t leverage the talent of their employees in improving the vision, strategy, and action of IT in business outcomes. Imagine what you could accomplish if your teams understood how they fit into the overall strategy of your business. Your IT teams aren’t just support. They’re a critical component — and really backbone — of your company’s success. Why shouldn’t they also be intimately familiar with its big picture? And leveraged in shifting your company towards its goals? With business acumen, your team will better understand how to speak the language of business, allowing them to see how their decisions and ideas will impact the entire company. Not only will this training impact their decision making ability, but it will also allow them to be more effective at presenting meaningful ideas and opportunities at the leadership level. And who doesn’t need more of that in their company?

Business acumen is a foundation that's needed, but that's too often missing, in corporate curriculums. DOES EVERYONE NEED BUSINESS ACUMEN? FAQs WHY CHOOSE US CLIENTS STORIES FAQs ARTICLES OUR TEAM YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS BUSINESS TALENT Business acumen is a foundation that's needed, but that's too often missing, in corporate curriculums. For example, without business acumen can individuals ever fully master more conventional business skills like leadership presence, negotiation, or communications? Even when it comes to something seemingly unrelated like diversity training – individuals with business acumen have a better understanding of how different perspectives can help shape a successful project and ultimately a successful company. Without business acumen, it's just another HR course. Developing business acumen gives your leaders a business footing on which to stand and it provides needed context and clarity on which to build additional business skills. And smart organizations are recognizing that including business acumen in their professional competency models is a real competitive advantage. Start a Conversation

Whoops! This page has moved. Go to the Right Page

Why is business acumen becoming a major initiative for CEOs and HR? Because business acumen training makes business leaders. WHAT IS BUSINESS ACUMEN? By Kevin Cope WHY CHOOSE US CLIENTS STORIES FAQs ARTICLES OUR TEAM BUSINESS ACUMEN DEFINITION Business acumen is keen, fundamental, street-smart insight into how your business operates and how it makes money and sustains profitable growth, now and in the future. Start a Conversation HAVE YOU EVER FOUND YOURSELF IN ONE OF THESE SITUATIONS? You’re talking with a senior leader of your company and wish you could say something really insightful to show your knowledge of the business, but your brain goes numb and you can’t come up with anything meaningful. You’re attending a meeting with managers or financial types and as they start reviewing financial statements, you get lost. You hope no one discovers the smile on your face or the nod of your head hides the gap in your knowledge. You can’t see what the numbers have to do with what you have to get done today or this week. Your CEO wants everyone to work harder to meet the company’s overall financial objectives. Your manager asks for ideas from the team, but you’re struggling to see how improving your job performance will impact the company’s revenue or stock price. You’ve got a great idea for a weekend business that you and a friend or your spouse could start up to bring in some extra money, but you don’t know how much money you would need to get started or how to handle financial matters once you do. You just don’t want to be like all those other start-ups that flop. If you’ve experienced moments like these, you certainly are not alone. In fact, you’re a member of a fairly large group—businesspeople who struggle to understand how the moving parts of a company work together to make it successful and how financial metrics like profit margin, cash flow, and stock price reflect how well each of those moving parts is doing its job. The solution to your confusion is developing your business acumen — your ability to see the big picture. DEFINING BUSINESS ACUMEN WITHIN YOUR CAREER Years ago a colleague of mine was consulting with a group of senior NASA managers at Cape Canaveral. He tried to explain, in simple terms, an organizational change strategy. The managers seemed confused. In an effort to clarify, he said, “Please don’t make this more complicated than it is. It’s not rocket science.” To which they sincerely answered, “We wish it were. We’d understand it better!” Many people, even those with jobs that others think of as incredibly complex, view their business much like rocket science: a lot of complexity, hard-to-understand data and formulas, communications in a language that barely resembles English. Yet most of them wish they could more clearly understand the business of their business and how to help their companies perform better. What they are wishing for is business acumen . Business acumen is keen, fundamental, street-smart insight into how your business operates and how it makes money and sustains profitable growth, now and in the future. In 2002, after ten years as an executive with FranklinCovey, consulting with and teaching for dozens of organizational clients, I founded my own training and consulting firm, Acumen Learning. We created and began delivering the Building Business Acumen® seminar. Over the last ten years, we have expanded and deepened the initial course. Our focus became the practical application of business acumen training to help people—at all levels, in any company, in any industry—become more effective in their current jobs and more successful in their future careers. After working with more than one hundred thousand participants in more than thirty countries, including many clients in the Fortune 500 and eighteen of the Fortune 50, the primary lesson we’ve learned is that businesspeople want to become more effective and valuable, to secure their seat at the table and influence decisions, to impact company performance. They want to use their full potential to help their business make money and sustain profitable growth. Start a Conversation LEARN MORE ABOUT BUSINESS ACUMEN If employees don’t know how their companies make money (and research suggests that most don't), how can they be trusted to set the right priorities and implement the right initiatives? They can’t! New York Times best-selling authors Kevin Cope and Stephen M. R. Covey founded the world’s leading business acumen training organization, Acumen Learning, to teach professionals about the business of their businesses. Since 2002, more than 500,000 business leaders in more than 35 countries and 23 of the Fortune 50 have counted on Acumen Learning to drive their business results through customized trainings. SEEING THE BIG PICTURE: BUSINESS ACUMEN TO BUILD YOUR CREDIBILITY, CAREER, AND COMPANY Robert was an excellent call center supervisor… or so he thought. He was dedicated to saving the company money because he was worried that they would outsource the call center to an overseas operation. He rarely recommended employees for recognition or raises. If his team presented ideas about new software or equipment that could improve productivity, he would listen but never take them to management for consideration. And he constantly harped on the importance of getting through calls as quickly as possible and up-selling customers as much as possible. He was fanatical about doing his job well. Robert didn’t realize that his narrow focus on cost control and “doing his job well” ignored the big picture of how his company made money and sustained profitability. He wasn’t connecting the dots between his efforts, customer relations, and future sales revenue. Or the huge cost of employee turnover the company was incurring every time one of his employees left to go somewhere with better pay and a stronger focus on serving customers. He failed to consider the impact he had on efficiency, profits, and morale by refusing to raise his team’s ideas with management. Ultimately, Robert was viewed by senior management as “a serviceable supervisor in need of development; not likely management material.” While he wasn’t let go, his performance reviews were never stellar and he could tell that he was being sidelined, but he didn’t understand why. Robert missed out on seeing the big picture of his main job: to contribute to building a company experiencing long-term, sustainable, profitable growth. So many of us fall into the same trap. Like Robert, over time, we tend to become more specialized and get very good at focusing on the specific parts of our jobs, so much so that we fail to see the big picture – how what we do fits into the overall picture of helping the company make money, achieve its strategic objectives, and be profitable. Some of us decide to get degrees in management, hoping to get that big-picture perspective. But while management education provides excellent training in areas such as accounting, marketing, or finance, students can graduate without an overall knowledge of how a business runs successfully. Their knowledge of the key drivers of business and how they work together can be fragmented, disjointed from the reality of daily operations. And as with Robert’s managers, many leaders assume that their teams have a much stronger grasp of the big picture of how their companies grow profitably—greater business acumen —than they actually do, so few take the time to do on-the-job training to deepen that knowledge. Do you think you’re better off than Robert? That you wouldn’t have made the same mistakes? Now’s your chance to prove it. Take the Big Picture Quick Quiz shown here. The questions were not picked at random; they are the result of research and interviews with hundreds of executives and CEOs from dozens of different industries. They reflect the areas of performance that senior leaders have on their minds and want employees to have on theirs. BIG PICTURE QUIZ We’ve administered the Big Picture Quick Quiz to over sixty thousand people. On average, people know the answer to fewer than two of the questions. These questions focus on the overall business, not the operations of your department or division. I suspect that you might be more familiar with some of the performance measures for your immediate team. But your senior management team wants the entire business to be profitable, not just a single unit. They want all employees to understand and better contribute to how the entire company makes money. The problem is that while we understand our jobs, the big picture seems too complex to grasp. Complexity is an underlying challenge in any business, regardless of size, industry, or stage of development. Large companies, especially, have many moving parts—departments and divisions (always reorganizing), product lines (always changing), layers of management, competitive realities, unclear decision-making processes, regulatory pressure, shifting budgets, new strategies. A small problem within any single element might produce a ripple effect throughout the organization, requiring major repairs. But without knowing the true source of the difficulty (which is not always readily identifiable), we might “fix” the wrong thing as we tinker with the business. Developing business acumen helps us cut through this complexity, get a bird’s eye view of a business, and understand our specialized roles within it. Simplifying complexity and broadening our understanding of the business enables us to fix present problems, prevent new ones, and take advantage of opportunities to grow. How do we simplify the complex? By looking at the key drivers that make all the parts of a business run. The 5 Key Drivers of Any Business When you break down even the largest, most complex multinational company—like Walmart, Apple, Toyota, or Boeing—into its most fundamental elements, you’ll find the same drivers that power your business, or any business. What are those drivers? Cash Profit Assets Growth People How did we distill it down to these five? We we used the core financial statements—the statement of cash flows (cash), the income statement (profit), and the balance sheet (assets)—as the foundation. These are the statements every company uses to judge its current strength and its future prospects. The fourth driver, growth, is reflected in all of these statements and for public companies is an important objective for shareholders. And the fifth driver is quite simple: Without good employees providing value to paying customers, the other four drivers cease to exist. The 5 Key Drivers will help you understand and visualize how even the most complicated business can be analyzed and improved. Like the 26 characters of the English alphabet, the 5 Key Drivers combine in a multitude of ways to form the foundation of organization, products, market position, financing, human resources, and every other strategy or decision in a company. Leaders must set and achieve goals and obtain results in these five areas in order to achieve the most important objective for any company: long-term, sustainable profitability to support its mission. You’ve probably heard of these essential elements, but you may not really understand their full importance and interdependence in creating success. While each driver is unique, it is also completely dependent on all of the other drivers. You cannot affect one without influencing the performance of another. Leaders have to take the connections between the drivers into account as they make their decisions, or they risk becoming overly focused on one driver and running an idea into the ground. Your ability to understand these relationships and affect these drivers through your decisions and actions can increase your own ability to contribute to the long-term profitability and growth of your company. Start a Conversation LEARN MORE ABOUT BUSINESS ACUMEN TRAINING FOR YOUR CAREER If you want to be more visible and valued, demonstrate that you understand how your department or unit fits into the big picture of the overall business. If you want to influence the thinking and decisions of your supervisor or manager, address the topics that senior leaders, including your boss, are concerned about. Communicate your ideas and proposals in language that he or she understands. If you want to be seen as a major contributor, show that you understand the relationships among the key drivers of your overall business—not just how your department works. If you want to be a more effective leader, better able to engage your team, link your team’s actions with the overall needs and strategic goals of the company. Keep in mind, even your managers might not be as knowledgeable in some of these areas as you think. While they may be functionally brilliant, they may not see the big picture. But I encourage you to ask questions and be willing to act on the answers. You’ll be recognized as a contributor, somebody who demonstrates business acumen through savvy questions and effective actions. If you are an individual looking to build your business acumen , check out our best selling book and interactive online learning course . If you are interested company-wide training, check out our customized business acumen training programs. WHY BUSINESS ACUMEN? READ HOW TO LAND A SALES PITCH READ ENGAGEMENT APOCALYPSE READ FOCUSING ON THE RIGHT THING READ