What is Business Acumen, and do your sales professionals have it?

Have you ever heard a CEO complain about meeting with sales professionals who waste their time? One of the complaints I’ve heard is that sales professionals spend too much time trying to “get friendly” by asking business background questions, and then launching into a series of questions trying to find a problem they can solve. The bottom line is that “they just don’t know anything about my business.”

On the other hand, I’ve heard sales executives complain that the biggest issue facing their company is that sales professionals can't build relationships with executives at customer organizations. They end up selling to departmental or technical buyers who buy based on price, relegating their products and services to commodity status.

When you consider both the buyer and seller complaints, it’s easy to see that this is really two sides of the same coin. Sales professionals are not meeting the expectation of customer executives, and sales professionals don’t communicate effectively with customer executives.

Why the sales disconnect? One of the key reasons is that sales organizations traditionally train their sales professionals on product, internal systems (CRM, order entry, etc.), and the latest sales process. When sales don’t meet expectations; the solution must be more, or better, product, systems, and sales process training.

Let’s face it. It’s tough enough to get a meeting with customer executives, but when they do most sales professionals don’t know what to say that has meaning for a company executive. When that happens, they fall back on their product training (product description, features and benefits, technology and applications, etc.) and sales process training (business background, revenue, markets, locations, goals and objectives, issues and financial implications, qualifying, objections, etc.).

What customer executives are looking for is how the sales professional’s products or services will help positively impact their businesses goals and objectives. The sales professional should be focusing the discussion on the customer’s key metrics, and how the sales professional’s products and services can provide a positive impact on those metrics. In other words, they should be applying business acumen to connect their products and services to the customer’s business.

So what is business acumen? There is no exact definition for business acumen, but Wikipedia describes it as “a concept pertaining to a person's knowledge and ability to make profitable business decisions.” Combined with sales acumen, business acumen means knowing and understanding the trends, challenges and opportunities in your customer’s market, and connecting them to your company’s products and services.

Unfortunately many sales organizations assume their sales professionals have business acumen, and that they already know, or will learn, the customer’s business without training assistance. The question for you is; 1) do your sales professionals have business acumen, and 2) do they learn the customer’s business/industry on their own? The answer is a usually resounding NO on both counts.

How can you improve the business acumen of your sales professionals? The two areas to focus on are financial knowledge and industry knowledge. Financial knowledge does not mean “finance for non-financial managers.” It’s a general comfort with financial terminology, and focuses on what sales professionals need to know to map their products and services to the customer’s metrics. Industry knowledge is a comfort with the industry terminology, and focuses on the trends, challenges and opportunities in your customer’s industry and market.

If you would like to know more about building business acumen in your sales force visit the Cybernetic Learning Systems website, or contact Oliver McClellan at 770-982-5517 (oliver@cls2learn.com).

Consultants vs. Contractors - Do you know the difference?

What’s the difference between a consultant and a contractor?

Do you think consultants and contractors are the same thing? If you answered yes, you are not alone. Unfortunately the distinction between consultants and contractors has become blurred in the recent past. I’ve heard the terms consultant, contractors, independent contractors (ICs), freelancers, and free agents all used interchangeably, when in fact, there are important differences.

Contractor Defined
 
“A ‘contractor’ or ‘independent contractor’ is a person, business, or corporation which provides goods or services to another entity under terms specified in a contract or within a verbal agreement. Contractors can work directly for a client, or through an umbrella company that provides contracting services to a broad range of clients.” (Wikipedia)

Many times contractors are used as substitutes for employees (temporary or supplemental staffing):

• Engaged to work on a specific project until its completion
• Programmer developing software
• Writer creating user guide
• Trainer delivering a client developed/owned course
• A resource brought in to supplement internal resources (specific expertise)
• Their role is very directed and limited
• Typically they are placed by another firm (staffing)
• Generally treated as IRS 1099 non-employee labor

 Consultant Defined

“A consultant is a professional who provides advice in a particular area of expertise such as management, technology, human resources, performance support, marketing, finance, etc. A consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. A consultant usually engages with multiple and changing clients providing deeper levels of expertise than would be feasible for clients to retain in-house. Clients purchase only the service they require from an outside consultant.” (Wikipedia)
 
Consultants are usually viewed as external “service providers”:

• A highly knowledgeable resource brought in to define and address a specific business need
• Experienced as an external adviser to many clients
• Brings business models or proven methodologies to address client needs
• May perform a range of duties, but are entirely responsible for all aspects of the project
• Contracts and invoices directly with clients
• Generally required by clients to be incorporated and have general and professional liability insurance

What is Cybernetic Learning Systems, Inc.?

We are NOT contractors. We are a firm of highly skilled consultants who specialize in addressing our client’s performance improvement issues. We are typically engaged to research and analyze a performance issue, design a solution, develop the solution, and sometimes we deliver the solution within the client organization.

We have been fortunate in that many times our clients ask us to deliver leader-led courses we’ve developed for them. This ongoing work may appear to be contract work, but it is actually an extension of the original project assignment. And because our staff is highly skilled, consultants have on occasion been asked by a client to deliver a session of courses we didn’t develop. But this isn’t “contract” work. It’s a service we provide to clients as part of our overall relationship.

Welcoming Ideas.

Please! Don't force me to learn what I don't need to know.

I'm in the learning and development business, and ideally I'm called in to evaluate a situation and recommend an intervention that will provide significant improvements for my client. Unfortunately, most of the time it doesn't work that way.

In practice I find that many times clients have made up their mind about training needs before they seek assistance from training providers (internal or external). The decision on what should and should not be covered in a course, the delivery methodology, and course length is often based on the client’s personal experiences, everyday observations, intuition, rumor, and gut feelings.

My favorite response to why a topic should be included in training is; "because they need to know it." This usually means that the topic is very important to the client's job, not necessarily what the student needs to know to do their job.

How can we as learning and development professionals influence the client to back up and do a more through job of evaluating training needs? It’s my experience that you have to show the client that there are gaps in understanding the target student’s needs by asking targeted questions. Place yourself in the learner’s position, and based on what you know about the project ask questions:

• How does this product/process/etc. impact my other job responsibilities?
• How will I be measured during and after the training?
• What support resources are available once I complete the training?
• Can I take the training online? I learn better that way.
• Etc., etc.

Have I ever accepted a project from a client without the opportunity to do an up-front analysis to ensure that the client’s assumptions were correct? Of course I have. I’ve got to make a living, and if the client is dead set on developing a course based on their gut intuition vs. research, I’ll do my best to make it successful in spite of the situation.

If we are given the chance, there are many tools and techniques we can use research the needs of the target population and management before making recommendations about training needs.

One method is the use of paper-based or online surveys. I recently used Zoomerang to conduct an online survey of senior management opinions regarding the addition of new products to a company’s sales catalog. It was fast and easy to set up and administer, and the comments from the managers was overwhelmingly positive. Since the response data was ready immediately, I was able to very quickly develop a comprehensive report that included recommendations.

There are many survey tools out there, but if you are planning to using a survey on a project I personally recommend Zoomerang.