Sales training is one of the biggest focus areas of many talent development and sales enablement strategies. Sales training includes methodology, selling skills, process, sales management, tools, frameworks, and product knowledge. However, while these competencies are important, there's an emerging and critical need to prioritize Business Acumen training to the top of the list.

During the past year, Advantexe has designed, developed, and delivered major sales training engagements for some of the most renowned sales teams on the planet. All of our engagements include a significant component of Business Acumen for Sales Professionals that provides the foundational skills to understand their customers’ business better and to also understand how their own companies generate profitable revenue.

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During the past few years, Advantexe has been involved in the design, development, and delivery of Coaching simulations to tens of thousands of people and process leaders. All of the simulations have a goal of providing participants with the opportunity to learn by doing as they practice having coaching conversations based on various coaching models. 

Before starting a project where we are delivering a coaching simulation, we have a serious conversation with the client about making sure they aren’t developing skills that coach for failure. It is a provocative approach, but one that our clients truly appreciate. Here’s why… 

There is a fundamental problem with most coaching frameworks and the way the organizations embrace them. Typically, the first step of coaching is setting goals and objectives and then having a dialogue about how to best achieve them. The fundamental problem is that most organizations aren’t providing the basic business acumen skillsneeded by every employee to understand their own business strategy and the financial skills to measure their success.

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As the dust settles on J&J’s recent separation of their fast-moving consumer healthcare products business, there is increased momentum and pressure for other big pharmaceutical companies to re-think their business portfolios.

I am 100% certain it will be a topic of discussion in many of our upcoming business acumen programs and several of our pharmaceutical business simulations actually allow participants to spin out product lines and entire businesses to see the impact strategically and financially.

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Every business simulation developed for our clients is designed with a set of learning objectives and outcomes in mind. For the most part, these objectives revolve around helping learners to better understand business acumen topics such as developing and executing business strategies, reading and applying financial statements, enhancing problem-solving and critical thinking abilities, and understanding cross-functional decision-making.

But should improved business acumen skills really be the objective of a business simulation? It’s kind of crazy to think about, but should the outcome of a simulation-centric learning journey be something different? Could the true magic of simulations be a learning environment that helps participants focus on how to be more collaborative and better team members when dealing with individuals with diverse backgrounds and personal goals?

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There is a new phenomenon sweeping the corporate landscape. Companies are reassigning workers to new roles and leaving it up to them to figure out what to do next. It works like this; one day, you get an email that your current job role has been eliminated, but you haven’t been fired. You have a new role, most likely a hybrid role of doing 100% of two other jobs that have been vacant or are important enough to shift resources toward. These changes leave managers and employees confused, angry, and checked out.

Welcome to the concept of “Quiet Cutting.” This concept is an offshoot of the “Quiet Quitting” movement where workers quit their companies and hang around long enough to get paid a good salary while they find a new job which only lasts for 9-12 months until they silent quit again or they are terminated for poor performance.

Quiet cutting effectively allows companies to cut jobs, trim costs, and reorganize without actually laying off workers.

Forbes Magazine has been keeping a running list of all the companies that have been doing restructurings (including layoffs) during the year and it includes IBM, Adobe, BioGen, Salesforce.com, and many others.

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