Having the opportunity to work with thousands Senior and Mid-level leaders from leading organizations around the world to refine their Business Acumen and Business Leadership skills provides me with insights and perspectives that are unparalleled.

I recently completed an engagement at a large Fortune 500 company that had me deliver a training and development session around a new business strategy and the leadership skills required to execute it successfully.

At the urging of the client, we decided to start in the middle and work up as opposed to a top-down training design.  What occurred was startling in terms of the disconnect between the middle-level leaders who thought they had been doing a great job and the senior-level leaders who thought the entire group of mid-level leaders were incapable of delivering on the new strategy and the value proposition to customers.

Three Skills You Should Have Developed

There’s an old saying in the running world that goes “Races in May are won on cold winter days.”  The same idea can be applied to the process of selling and winning major deals; your most important and significant deals of 2019 and beyond will be won with training next January.  As many business and sales professionals turn their attention to closing business in the third and fourth quarters of 2018, the really strategic sales leaders will start thinking about today’s deal and the future deals by planning their next National Sales meetings that will occur in the first quarter of 2019.

As we all know, sophisticated selling is a complex process that requires aggressive preparation, determination, and strong relationships. So, what are the skills that will be most beneficial to beat your competitors and win the deals that will make your 2019 the best it can be?

Based on research, observations, and our own experiences during the last 25 years, here are 3 skills that you can start thinking about as the core skills for your 2019 kickoff sales meeting.

Understand your customer’s business

Understanding your customer’s business has become almost cliché and too many sales professionals think they know their customer’s strategy simply by looking at the customer’s website 5 minutes before a call taking a customer out for dinner.  In today’s extremely competitive business environment, understanding your customer’s business means:

• You know the customer’s business strategy, goals, and objectives
• You can measure the impact of challenges and opportunities your customer has by reading their P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow report
• You understand the customer’s drivers of business performance and the “levers” they pull to achieve them

Position your value from the customer’s business perspective

The next important skill is being able to position your value from the customer’s business perspective and not your business perspective.  Customer’s don’t care about your goals nor do they care about the features of your product or service; they want to know how you are going to impact their business performance through the value proposition you offer them.  Customers are now demanding that you understand their business and that you can directly demonstrate how your value proposition will deliver a significant ROI within a short amount of time.

Be authentic

The digital age has changed the way successful companies sell because customers can have as much if not more information about your company, your products, and your people than the sales professionals who call on them. In the matter of a few moments, customers can review product spec sheets, product reviews, LinkedIn profiles, and engage in social media to get the information they need and that’s relevant specifically to them.  In other words, sales people today can’t just rely on good old-fashioned BS and baffle customers with stuff they don’t know.  That means today’s sales professionals must be authentic and real; focused on the specific needs of their customers.  Being authentic means being truthful and even walking away from business if it’s not the right solution for the customer.

In summary, it’s just about the planning season for next year.  Business Acumen for Sales Professionals, Strategic Business Selling, and dynamic interactive methodologies of learning such as digital business simulations should be high on your list of priorities as you start to think about the reasons why your 2019 will be so successful.

One of the most interesting themes emerging from today’s “New Leadership Playbook” that many organizations are trying to utilize is something called the “Fail-Fast-Forward” culture where leaders are being encouraged to create environments for their teams to innovate through learning from mistakes.  One of the biggest drawbacks of this approach - according to most business professionals who try to lead and execute innovation - is they find themselves being “blamed for failure” if their attempt at innovation doesn’t work the first time.  This blame can create a toxic culture and an environment where the team will never want to try to innovate again because they don’t want to be blamed for failure again.  People are very sensitive to it and may eventually leave your organization because of it.