Five Business Acumen Tips That Separate Order-Takers from Trusted Advisors

Senior executives do not need another product pitch. And quite frankly, they don’t care about your product pitch. They need clear business solutions. When you’re sitting across the table from a CEO, CFO, BU President, or Chief Commercial Officer, the evaluation criteria shifts toward real business solutions that have measurable short-term and long-term impacts.
They are not asking:

• “Does this have good features?”
• “Is the team responsive?”
• “Can you send a proposal?”

They are asking:

• “How does this drive sustainable revenue?”
• “Does this improve margin or manage costs through efficiency and productivity?”
• “Does this reduce enterprise risk?”
• “Does this align with our strategy and capital priorities?”

If you want to impress a senior-level buyer, business acumen is not optional. It is the price of entry to the opportunity. Business acumen in sales is what separates order-takers from trusted advisors when selling to senior executives. 

Based on our research and years of experience designing, developing, and delivering award-winning business acumen skill-building solutions, we are pleased to share five specific ways to demonstrate it with examples.

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Some of my best blogs come directly from interviews with subject-matter experts while we are designing business acumen simulations.

Recently, I interviewed a senior line manager at a high-tech company. He shared a story that was equally hilarious and horrifying.

They were launching a major AI-enabled services initiative to support their core hardware platform. Big opportunity. Big revenue potential. Big margin expansion if executed well.

The marketing team was already a little chaotic. Eight people. Project managers. Event planners. Administrators. Everyone busy. No one is quite sure who owned what.

And then…

Corporate procurement stepped in.

“We were told we had to route every vendor, every venue contract, every service agreement through corporate procurement,” he said. “It turned managed chaos into mismanaged chaos.”

Procurement didn’t understand the product. They didn’t understand the launch strategy. They didn’t understand the revenue objectives. They didn’t understand the margin profile of the new services.

But they absolutely understood how to slow things down.

The tipping point?

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Something fascinating happened today during one of the Board of Directors presentations that was the culmination of a 4-month business acumen training program. The purpose of the Board of Directors presentations was for each team who had run their simulated company over 5 simulated years to share their strategy, goals, objectives, accomplishments, and guidance looking forward.

Typically, these presentations are very good, but also very straightforward. Well, today, things got a little interesting for one of my teams…

They opened their presentation with the following, “Board of Directors, we stand here before you today humbled. Humbled by our failures, humbled by our behaviors, and humbled by your support of us to fix things and bring our company forward with such great results. During the first three years of our tenure, we did not get along. As a matter of fact, several of us stopped speaking to each other because of the arguments we were having about our strategy and metrics of success. It was an awful, gut-wrenching experience and there were several times each of us was ready to quit the simulation and the program.”

“However, by the fourth year, we got our act together, created alignment, understood our customers, created the perfect value proposition, and executed flawlessly. We went from tears of pain to tears of joy and as you know, we have achieved the highest total shareholder return in our market with an over 125% return including dividends.”

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Last weekend my wife asked me to fix something wrong with the plumbing. Between you and me, probably not the best idea. I can manage a wrench… a little bit, but before you know it, I had water spraying everywhere, and I was Googling "how to undo ...." It’s safe to say, by the end, we’d called a professional and were dealing with way more costs (and frustration) than if we’d just done that in the first place.

Now, let’s think about your business. Every day, businesses around the world are asking employees at all levels to navigate their roles without an understanding of how to drive the business. That’s why Business Acumen Training should be a priority for any organization that is focused on growth and long-term success.

In our experience working with over 250 global companies here are five critical reasons why investing in Business Acumen Training should be a priority:

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It’s only the last week of August and Starbucks is already in full marketing mode with the early launch of its popular menu of Pumpkin Spice Lattes items (apparently the cool folks just call them PSLs so that’s what I will use in this blog).

Think about this: In 2024, people on vacation at the beach can Uber Eats their PSL drinks directly to their portable cabana. Who would have thought it?

The PSLs are a significant part of the Starbucks seasonal line up and given the recent organizational and Wall Street turmoil surrounding the surprise exit of the CEO after less than 2 years, the company is counting on big-time revenues in an attempt to turn around its sagging stock price performance. While Starbucks doesn’t publicly release individual product sales data, there are many analyst reports out there that indicate the PSL portfolio will account for up to $2 billion of the overall $36 billion of top-line revenue.

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