“Developing business acumen enterprisewide meets a critical training and development need as well as restores much-needed street cred to the learning function,” states Chief Learning Officer Magazine in the August 2010 issue.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. 

Better still, the article opportunistically focuses on the role of business acumen within leadership development. 

How Business Acumen Enhances Leadership Development

Today, consistent with previous periods of economic challenge, investment in developing leadership skills is enjoying resurgent growth.  Positioning the business acumen skills that Know it Now develops to enhance traditional leadership competencies, such as interpersonal skills and decision making, offers a compelling path to participate in this growing sector.

Here are a few talking points from the magazine:

• Business acumen is a key requirement for being an effective leader.
• Many senior executives in all industries tend to be deluded about their own levels of business acumen.
• Business acumen is all about showing how our behaviors directly impact and improve business outcomes, measured in financial and market value terms.
• Business acumen development aims to fill the chasm in traditional leadership development programs

As Chief Learning Officer Magazine adroitly emphasizes, “Business acumen is a critical need for all companies if they are first to survive and then to prosper.” 

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been invited by the Strategic Accounts Management Association (SAMA) to speak in highly acclaimed webinar series.  Designed for Strategic Account Managers, the session will focus on how smart SAMs use financial data to engage CXOs.

For customers large or small, for profit or non-profit, their financials clearly signal where you can help them improve performance.  However, translating the overwhelming volume of available information into effective, results-oriented executive conversation is time consuming and challenging. 

This non-technical webinar, delivered by Chairman James Melillo, will highlight the most useful sources of financial information for SAMs as well the specific sections within those sources to prioritize. Sharing concrete strategies and advice for reading the story behind your customer’s numbers, you’ll learn how to leverage financial insights to:

• Create business curiosity that provokes executives to meet with you
• Pinpoint areas where accounts are most likely to invest
• Quantify your value using metrics meaningful to the account
• Positively influence the business case for investing in your solutions
• Avoid areas where financial discussions often fail

Register Now

We’re all interested in uncovering opportunities before our competitors.  But few of us have the bandwidth to process the ever-growing volume of information being pushed and pulled our way.  By way of example, Bank of America’s recent 10-K was over 750 pages.  And filled with mind-numbing language.  That’s why we recommend allowing someone else to do it for you.  Checkout www.footnoted.org.  

Required regulatory filings often harbor critical insights for uncovering strategic selling opportunities.  Yet, they’re commonly buried amid volumes of irrelevant information. 

While you may not have heard of footnoted.org – whose primary purpose is to help investors – it may be worthwhile to see if any of your accounts are covered.  The site’s operator, Michelle Leder, scours the volumes of such filings and publishes they eye-catching stuff many companies would rather not publicize.

You may unearth input for your sales campaign around executive compensation, strategic alliances or risks confronting your customer to align your value.  Conduct a search, register to receive email updates and put yourself a step ahead of the competition.

We often hear from you “I’m looking for focused, chunked down opportunities to continue to learn and apply my executive selling skills.  What do you offer?”  Today, we offer good news:  We’re launching Know it Now Blended Workshops, a series of workshops that combine self-paced learning applied via executive-led virtual classrooms.

Know it Now Blended Workshops, the latest extension of its Know it Now online learning framework, combines award winning Know it Now self-paced courseware subsequently applied via executive-led virtual sessions, workshops are designed for building specific executive selling skills.

"These workshops are ideal for group or individual use," said Eric Beckman, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Executive Conversation. "The specific focus of each workshop allows sales professionals to strengthen the executive selling skills most valuable to them.”

Three Workshops Available

Appropriate for account managers, sales management, account teams, technical sales and business development managers, choose from these workshops:

• 4 Tenets of Accessing Customer Executives
  Ready to set aside your old beliefs?  While the 4 tenets may seem contrary to what you’ve learned, these truths will position you to generate the type of business curiosity that provokes customers to engage.

• Business Relevant Account Planning
  How could working with a C-level Executive improve your account planning?  Regardless of methodology, effective account plans anchor around validated customer initiatives.  Learn how this is done from a buyer’s perspective.  

• Seller’s 20-Minute Guide to Financial Statements
  Your customers are intimately familiar with their company’s most recent results, are you? For customers large or small, publicly traded or privately held, their financials clearly signal opportunities where you can create demand.   

Special group purchase packages available

Dedicated deliveries and package pricing are available when twelve or more individuals from one company register for the same workshop.  Package pricing is also available for individuals who wish to purchase multiple workshops.

Availability is limited, register today.

Any meeting with a customer executive demands aligning with the executive’s business priorities, having meaningful ROI numbers at hand, and more.  However, you also need to be able to nimbly navigate the twists and turns that can unexpectedly arise during your face-to-face conversation. To be ready for conversational pitfalls that take you off message, add role playing to your preparation.

If you’re not comfortable with role playing, get over it. It’s the best way to simulate the scenarios that can derail any well-rehearsed presentation and foresee how to effectively respond when the dialogue digresses.

Remember that this is the executive’s meeting, not yours. This person sets the agenda and can route the conversation in any direction.

For role playing, enlist a colleague or manager to play an executive and imitate that individual’s personality. Work your script against your co-worker’s portrayal of the hurried executive, or the skeptical executive, or the executive who recently had a poor experience with another sales professional.

By practicing your delivery in these less-than-ideal situations, you develop the ability to deviate from your plan yet still have a successful businessperson-to-businessperson dialogue.

If possible, have a third person observe the action. Ask your colleagues to rate you on how well you are able to cover the basics of any executive-level engagement. These include your ability to:

• Cite external factors to establish your credibility
• Link customer business initiatives to your proposed solution
• Demonstrate business impacts using meaningful metrics
• Articulate the business change you’re envisioning in parlance of the executive
• Engage the executive to validate opportunities
• Close the meeting with a call for executive sponsorship

More Meeting Tips

There are a few other key things you should keep in mind and have your role-playing cohorts watch for during these practice sessions as well:

• Get to the point. Don’t expect to have more than two minutes to engage the executive and deliver your value proposition. Make it succinct and understandable. You need to set both the scope and expectation right away.
• Listen more than talk. Once the stage is set, pay particular attention to who is doing most of the talking. After your value proposition is on the table, the ratio of dialogue should be 80 percent executive and 20 percent you. If this ratio gets reversed, it means you have not engaged the executive. Recheck your messaging and try again.
• Don’t run from tough questions. Be prepared for "show stopper" questions – questions you are not prepared for. Practice handling these, and clearly communicating that you will get back to the executive with answers. Ducking tough questions will reflect poorly on your trustworthiness and integrity.
• Focus on the pain point. Keep the discussion focused on the business problem the executive needs to solve, and resist the temptation to focus on your solution. Again, this meeting is about the executive and the executive’s issues, not about you and your quota. If your meeting is a success, you will gain sponsorship and your solution’s value can then be fully developed and quantified.
• Look for other sales opportunities. If an executive is not interested in your solution and insists on talking about other problems, don’t resist. Give up on your script and pay attention. This is a great time to practice your listening and questioning skills. The outcome may result in an even better sales opportunity than you expected.

Finally, pay attention to the overall tone and content of your message. This meeting should be all about the executive, not about you. A practice partner who is overly critical on this point will help you greatly.

Give a try and let us know the results!

While you likely already read your customer’s annual report, specifically the Letter to Shareholders and MD&A, you may not regularly leverage management presentations to gain customer insight.   However, the increasing transparency of today’s corporate landscape has turned these presentations into highly useful sources of timely customer information.

Why This Information is So Useful

Presentations that management makes to analysts and the investment community are arguably even better than reading the Letter to Shareholders in terms of a quick, timely source for gaining customer insights. As you learn more about the information they provide, management presentations may become the first place you look in researching your customers and preparing for an executive engagement. Two strong reasons why the information you’ll find is so useful:

· Highly current information

Unlike annual reports and regulatory filings that have a short shelf life and may be dated at the time you’re doing research, management presentations are typically very current. In fact, companies often pull them from their Web sites within a relatively short period of time to avoid risks or exposure associated with changing market conditions and the company’s evolving strategic direction.

· Presented in executives’ own words

Management presentations enable you to learn what’s happening within your account directly from the executives you may be targeting to meet with as well as other key officers. The information allows you to clearly identify customer initiatives that will help you build business alignment with your solution. It also clearly identifies the customer’s priorities and gives you access to up-to-date financial metrics and business issues, clearly stated in the executives’ own words.

Using the Information

Having this kind of background on an account before making your first call puts you at an advantage. You’ll be able to demonstrate you’ve done your homework and thereby establish credibility. You’ll also be able to begin linking your solutions to the company’s issues and priorities – the ones that executive officers have identified as meaningful and top-of-mind.

Following are example presentation slides that illustrate the type of information you’ll gain access to.

In this presentation, Level 3’s CFO not only identifies cost advantage as a key initiative, but also discusses operational efficiency, potential M&A activity and maintaining financial strength. You can use this insight to develop a value proposition demonstrating how your solution drives cost savings, improves efficiencies, reduces time to integration for future acquisitions as well as improves cash flow – all of which, when quantified and linked to these initiatives, demonstrate your credibility.

In this presentation, Alltel’s Group President of Operations shares a host of potential points of alignment where your solution might help the company achieve its stated initiatives.

Accessing the Information

First, check your customer’s Web site. The presentations that companies make to analysts and investment communities on a quarterly basis can typically be found in the Investor Relations area. Often you’ll have a choice of viewing the presentations themselves, reading transcripts or listening to audio archives of Webcasts. Additional online resources include Earnings.com and Yahoo! Finance, where you can access conference calls by entering a company’s stock ticker symbol.

Tip: Subscribe to an e-mail alert service. Many companies offer this as part of their investor relations effort. You’ll know right away when new information that may identify a selling opportunity is made available.

One Stop for Valuable Insight

Management presentations offer "one-stop shopping" for obtaining timely account information that can give you the insight you need to establish credibility and identify opportunities. You may find they’re the best overall source for identifying current customer business issues and priorities.

What’s been your experience?

Chris Howard, vice president of research and co-founder of Bersin & Associates, shares his insights on critical success factors in effectively leveraging technology for learning and development initiatives.  In recognizing our Know it Now™ online learning platform with a 2010 Learning Leaders Award for Vendor Innovation in Learning and Talent Management, Chris stated “measurable business impact was one of the key things we looked for in choosing winners.”

Q: What questions do you counsel organizations address before investing in online learning?

A: The first generation of online learning basically replaced classroom instruction, taking content and turning into web pages. The resulting courses were often too long and people wouldn’t take them. Organizations should ask themselves:
1) How does learning fit into the overall picture, the overall instructional plan?

2) How can we combine modalities – classroom instruction, eLearning, coaching – so as not to replace classroom instruction, but rather to augment classroom instruction?

Q: For organizations looking to effectively integrate online learning into their development initiatives, what critical success factors should they consider?

A: Measurement should be at the top of the list. In general, measuring learning is a real challenge. Traditional models, with Kirkpatrick probably the most well known are fine, however; our perspective on measurement is that ultimately it’s all around impact.

Many of the Learning Leader applications we received showed a variety of metrics, but measurable business impact is what differentiated the winners. The way I look at learning is like any other business function: once you’re properly aligned with the business impact, you can measure a lot of things.

Executive Conversation’s industry, sales training, is one of the most dynamic examples. Companies may have lots of new products coming out quickly and struggle to keep up training on all products. By setting up training to be readily accessible, chunking it up into pieces and delivering in a variety of modalities, sales people can get it when they need it and resulting sales performance can be tracked.

Q: Learners work on their actual accounts and opportunities to complete activities within Know it Now, in your opinion is the learning efficacy of using such real world scenarios stronger than relying on case materials?

A: Definitely. There’s nothing like getting your hands on the real problem. In the case of sales people, who are not inclined to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time taking a course, this is especially true. We believe if you do the homework upfront and design training to meet the needs of the target audience and the objectives of stakeholders, you can most successfully align with the business model.

Q: What are some of the most common shortcomings you see in leveraging technology for learning and talent management?

A: It gets back to knowing your audience, their tolerance for online media, how much time they’re willing to invest, how they prefer to learn, and the type of training you’re doing. The ‘throw it up and hope they come’ model that people did a few years ago has limited adoptability and was not successful. That’s the biggest misconception — deploying online learning that is not part of a plan or performance assessment or needs analysis and hoping they will come.

Q: Know it Now integrates learning, application and measurement within a single framework, how important is blending each of these elements for effective online learning?

A: The more you can do that the better. However, many organizations don’t have the time or see the importance. That’s where they bring in an organization like yours with the expertise and experience. Our research shows it is certainly optimal if you can have those pieces working together. In our view, the sum then becomes equal to more than the parts.

Q: What technology trends/advances do you see blossoming over the next 12-18 months?

A: The biggest areas we see are social capabilities, the concept of the organization teaching itself after some initial content introduction. We call it ‘we-learning.”. This is where the target community learns from each other with some support from a subject matter expert. This can be done in tandem with a formal initiative, or outside of that when the target audience already knows something about the subject and is just trying to sharpen their skills, or get ideas from someone else. We see training organizations becoming more of a catalyst for this type of collaboration so those in their organization can teach themselves online or offline.

Q: What’s a key area of focus for Bersin & Associates today?

A: We’re definitely focusing on talent development, talent acquisition and talent management strategies. In the sales arena, for example, we’re seeing development techniques designed to increase effectiveness versus simply to ‘sell more’ and using that as the sole basis for promotion. For example, how do we ready those in the sales organization who t exhibit leadership characteristics to take on new management responsibilities? While organizations often want that to happen organically, we’ve seen sales organizations prosper by integrating sales training with bigger programs for becoming a more sophisticated organization.

I wanted to share with you an article by Martha Heller that I found both informative as well as insightful.   Heller writes about the traditional CIO role and some of the issues they have traditionally faced, the problems of transitioning from one regime to another, when bad technology meets good people, etc.  What takes this from a run of the mill article on the woes of CIOs are the insights into CIO strategy which occurs in the second half of the article.

Enabling is Failing!

I was particularly impressed with a quote from Scott McKay CIO from Genworth Financial who discusses the differences between being an enabler of business processes to a driver.  At first glance enabling business processes does not seem like a bad goal for IT.  What Scott as well as most CXOs know is that enabling a process gets none of the glory for success and is first in line for the responsibility for failure.    The idea of being an “enabler” like in a 12 step program is not one that is going to get you a lot of rewards.  Enabling is Failing!

View Video

For even more insights on the changing role of CIOs, take a look at this recording of one of the webinars from our Buyer’s Side Perspective series, Selling to Today’s CIOs.

Enabling processes in a company are a function of either supporting or coordinating another group’s goal or business process.  As a support role it is of course critical to getting the task done, after all we all need support in one way or another to accomplish our responsibilities.  The problem with being pigeon holed into this role is that it is seen more as a cost function than one of business value.  As a result the phrases “how much is this going to cost my budget” or “what’s the best way we can do this at the lowest price” becomes the guideline for the “enabler”.   Not only is the value stripped from the IT group but the ability to control their expenditures is moved to the original business group that is driving the process.

What You Should be Asking

The question you need to ask yourself personally is when you work with IT or the CIO which process do you lead with or support.  If you talk about TCO or your ability to deliver an SLA or even talk about being a one stop shop you are supporting the CIO to FAIL.  And if they don’t want to fail then where does that leave you and your ideas.

The question you need to ask is ‘What can I do to help the CIO/IT group to succeed?  What value add do you bring that they can bring to their business units?  How can you help them to lead and be one of the drivers of the business?  Once you have figured that out you now have a reason to engage in CIO executive conversation.

If you don’t know how just ask us.  After all we are a company made up of CXOs.  Your thoughts?

By Scott Karren, CEO Channel Ventures and Executive Conversation Consulting Executive

Social networks are all the rage right now. If you are not talking about ‘friends’ and ‘community’ you are SO 2009. With all of the smoke, it is hard to even get a glimpse at the mirrors.

I was recently engaged to facilitate a small channel community. Since the group met face-to-face only a couple times a year, we used web forums, teleconferences, and one-on-one phone calls to facilitate interaction. Because the group was hand picked by the vendor and all members had significant common interests, we were surprised at how hard the process was. Some community building principles have come to light through this process.

First

The facilitation team must have a member who is obsessed by the topic and issues. The team must have an individual who is not only super smart and experienced, but also endowed with boundless enthusiasm; someone who wakes up at two in the morning with valuable insights that must be communicated. This person can be a customer, an employee, an analyst or even a consultant, but has to have an unstoppable obsession for the group and for the topic.

Second

Communications within the group must be open and interesting. Conversations cannot be overtly censored or even covertly managed. If members get the sense that they cannot speak openly, they go mute. Although communication should be respectful, the objective is not to restate the party line or reiterate the program benefits. It is simply to explore, refine and document critical issues and their solutions. Because the issues are important, expect (even encourage) disagreement and strong feelings.

Third

Groups must have true leadership. People want to know their contributions are significant and that they make a difference. Communities can suffer from two kinds of failures: 1) lack of direction; and 2) lack of motivation. One is like being lost and the other is like being in a storm. Leadership is the ability to deliver both of these issues at the right times.

Without clear objectives, the individuals that make up a company, channel or community question whether or not they are in the right place. Loss of faith in a channel takes a long time to dissolve a community, but if it gets momentum, it is often fatal.

More sudden and more violent are the outbreaks of frustration that are manifest when community members feel disenfranchised or ignored. While they may still believe in the strategy and vision, they stop contributing positively because they are unrecognized. While most employers understand the need for providing recognition for employee contributions, channel managers often take the morale of their channel for granted.

‘Community’ is hot. We see it discussed in all of the news magazines. Yet even with all of the new community building tools (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn), true communities are still hard to create and grow. Without enthusiasm, candor and leadership they will never produce the returns both vendors and partners desire.

How successful have you been creating demand with today’s new breed of CIO?

Join us for this 30 minute complimentary webinar to gain an executive perspective on where – and how – you can offer value relevant to today’s CIOs.

Register Today

Date:  February 18, 2010 
Time:  11:30am ET | 8:30am PT | 16:30 GMT

About the Webinar

Today, CIOs are commonly members of their organization’s executive committee. They’re expected to be a driving force behind growth strategies. They’re challenged to address business issues such as:

• How well are we anticipating customer and market shifts?
• What new product opportunities does our customer data suggest?

This session will equip you to initiate CIO selling opportunities around:

• The new metrics by which today’s CIOs are compensated 
• 5 surprising trends that too few sellers play to their advantage 
• How to capitalize on the emerging partnerships between CIOs and other executives 
• What to do – and not do – around cloud computing and mobile capability initiatives 
• Positioning your value in sync with the 3 key roles successful CIOs must execute

About the Series

The popular series is led by acclaimed speaker James Melillo, this fast-paced, information-packed webinar series is designed to provide sales professionals with timely, actionable insights to sell to financial decision makers and executives. Each live session of this complimentary webinar series runs approximately 30 minutes followed by audience Q&A.

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Sample recorded excerpts from previous webinars