The first half of the year is over! The results are in the books and it’s time for many businesses to turn their attention to the second half of the year and beyond including initial planning for 2024.

Most people in the United States are going to relax, have a barbecue, do some binge-watching of some great shows on their favorite streaming service, and maybe do a little preparation for returning to work next week.

For your reading pleasure and to help the continuous process of building and strengthening thebusiness acumen skills of our more than 10,000 subscribers, Advantexe is pleased to share some business impacts of the holiday through the lens of business acumen. Much like we teach in our business simulation-centric learning programs, we present perspectives around the business levers that can be pulled and then share insights into the impacts of those levers. Be safe and enjoy!

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Something dramatic has happened to sales professionals around the world. Over the past six months, I have been working on several large global sales training engagements and I have noticed that a significant number of business-to-business sales professionals who once managed a portfolio of accounts and had the responsibility of growing those accounts through maintaining them and then looking for new opportunities have given up on new sales development.

I’ve been told by their managers and the sales professionals themselves that they simply are refusing to do new business development. What was once a hybrid of both farming and hunting has now evolved into an either/or role. Either you are a farmer and take orders from existing relationships, or you are a lone wolf hunter going after new business, bringing it on, and handing it off to a service team. The middle has gone away and in my opinion, that is a shame for everyone involved but most specifically the customer who can benefit from the experience and value that a true sales professional can add to an account.

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The annual ATD (Association for Talent Development) conference is a highly anticipated event for professionals in the training and development field. In addition to the diverse range of workshops and sessions, the expo floor is always one of the biggest highlights of the show, especially coming off the pandemic. While the show ran last year, this year was different. There was a buzz. There was energy. There was pent-up demand for new and innovative ways to learn in the new normal of work. It was back to the traditional size of nearly 10,000 people who were ready to explore.

As part of Advantexe’s presentation at our trade show booth, we hosted an engaging business simulation challenge for conference participants. The Advantexe Paws and Claws Simulation Challenge was a micro business simulation designed to be completed within 15 minutes. It allowed participants to experience the flexibility of our simulations while emphasizing the importance of developing business acumen skills.

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It seems like a simple question until you try to answer it.

Last week, a client and I were working on the design for a custom business simulation to teach Business Acumen skills to the top 150 leaders and one of the issues she was struggling with was how to share with the executive leadership team the way we are going to train the participants on the topic of quality.

This blog is an interesting summary of the findings and hopefully is of interest to you as you continue to build your business acumen capabilities.

Quality vs. The Perception of Quality

One of the first things I shared is that we must start the definition process by collectively establishing an understanding that there is a significant difference between intrinsic and benchmarked quality and the perception of quality. In its purest technical form, an organization can measure quality to some sort of defined benchmark. But that benchmark is going to be arbitrary and at best based on a combination of science and objectivity.

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For many marketers, this is tradeshow season and thousands of vendors will be packing up their booths while thousands of prospects and clients are walking up and down the aisles searching for that next new thing that will change their world. From an ROI perspective, opinions about the effectiveness of tradeshows are mixed and often divided – you either love them or hate them. For some, tradeshows are seen as a necessary evil; a box to be checked to avoid giving a negative impression to customers and the market that “you are not there.” For others, it is part of an integrated omnichannel marketing approach that is critical to a marketing and sales strategy.

Regardless of which way you look at a tradeshow, it does come with its challenges. The CFO complains about the cost, while the CEO expresses frustration over the lack of closed deals. The sales team, meanwhile, grumbles about spending 3 days away from the field generating leads only to have to hand them off to other salespeople who manage that account or territory.

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