The Urgent Case for Business Acumen

The vignette that follows is true. Only the names of been changed to protect the guilty.

The CEO was on the telephone. He said, “I need to speak with someone who knows more than you.” The salesperson on the other end of the phone responded, but it didn’t seem to help much. The CEO said, “Listen, I know more about this than you do. I want to speak with someone who knows more about this than I do.” The salesperson, cowed by the CEOs directness, scheduled for him to speak with someone else, someone with a better chance of helping him get what he wanted.

You can call what the salesperson was missing “insight,” if you want to. Or you can call it business acumen, like I do. You can call it situational knowledge. Or you might want to call it the ability to create value for your clients and prospects. It doesn’t matter what you call it because the end result is the same: If you don’t have the ability to help your client, they will find someone who does.

Do you want to make prospecting easier? Do you want to make it easier to open the relationships that open opportunities? Then you need the insight, business acumen, situational knowledge, and he ability to create the value necessary to opening those relationships.

Do you want to be relevant to the C suite? For that matter, do you want to be relevant to anybody within your dream clients company? If you want to be relevant and compelling you need to know enough to help your dream client with the biggest challenges and their biggest opportunities.

Do you want to be known as a trusted advisor? Do you want to be known as consultative? Do you have the kind of advice that can be trusted? Is your knowledge deep enough for you to be consultative?

You have no time to waste in developing the insight, the business acumen, and the situational knowledge necessary to help your clients succeed, lest you get punched in the mouth for not knowing enough and have to hand the phone to the salesperson sitting next to you (or worse still, your competitor).