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).