In the pursuit of perpetual learning and development about the important topic of Business Acumen, a question from one of our Software as a Service (SaaS) clients recently came our way: “Are there any patterns or observations we can make from a strategy perspective that we can learn from to make our business and skills better?”
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As part of a recent Advanced Business Leadership program, we conducted a breakout session on the challenges of providing feedback in today’s turbulent business environment. With so many companies implementing flatter more matrixed organizations, a team, project, or process leader could have dozens of employees working together without clear and distinct lines of reporting. In these situations, the focus is always solely on the work and rarely on people development.
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One would think that in the virtual business world we live in where capturing someone’s attention for more than 38 seconds before they are eyeball deep into their smartphones that the digital transformation would have taken care of something as trivial as building trust among leaders, peers, colleagues and direct reports. But as all effective leaders know, that hasn’t happened, and, in my opinion, it never will because of the human element of leadership and interpersonal relationships as it’s related to building or destroying trust.
The digital disruption never will find some slick app-based alternative to trust because at the end of the day, leadership is the execution of your business strategy through the people who work with you and for you. The job of being a great leader is to understand the strategy of your business and then align the right resources to make sure the strategy and value proposition is being executed flawlessly through the team leveraging the resources of the business.
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Want to meet up with friends for dinner? Start texting your group chat of friends to see who’s interested. When you hit your goal of at least 3, announce that anyone interested should meet at 7:30 pm at the corner of 16th at Main. When you meet up with everyone, you will figure out what type of cuisine everyone is interested in and use the OpenTable app to make an instant reservation…
Uh-oh, your first choice has no openings? Damn, shame on them. Go ahead and write a negative comment on their Yelp page saying how difficult it is to get in.
But by the time you are done writing the negative comment, someone else in the group has just made an online reservation at another place so let’s meet there and check it out. Nah, the avocado toast with caviar appetizer doesn’t look fresh, let’s cancel and go someplace else…
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The Impact of Discounting and Price Concessions
The primary objective of every Sales Professional is to close business and generate revenues by presenting customers with an irresistible value proposition. Revenue is the lifeblood of any business and without it, there simply is no business.
This week, I am working with a group of highly skilled Sales Professionals as part of a continuing, year-long curriculum that is focused in developing their Business Acumen skills. From an instructional design perspective, we are building their Business Acumen skills so they can help present their solutions to their customer from the business perspective and not just the product perspective. This approach identifies smart, and profitable revenues which is critical to their success.
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