CA
Commercial Acumen
Boost financial performance by empowering your sales team members to make better decisions.
Your salespeople and account managers make decisions every day that affect your profitability. What product mix to offer. How far to discount. Which service team makes sense for a given client. Whether to bill for that extra meeting or the supplies requested ‘just to help out’.
Yet few people making these decisions fully understand how their actions drive the P&L of an account, and ultimately that of the business.
Imparta’s Commercial Acumen programme is designed to give your teams a solid foundation in financial concepts, even if they are not from a financial background. It then helps them to apply that understanding to a range of critical tasks, including analysing what’s going on within a customer’s business, influencing their decision-making, setting and negotiating prices, and managing the costs and cashflow within an account.
Commercial Acumen is a critical skill for anyone involved in B2B sales or account management. It is especially relevant when financial decision-making takes centre stage, for example during an economic downturn or at times of high inflation and interest rates. It also improves the quality of negotiation outcomes and is complementary to our Negotiating Client Value programme.
This highly interactive programme develops commercial awareness and lasting skills through a comprehensive set of simulated activities, application and real-life exercises, tools and reinforcement techniques within Imparta’s continuous improvement ecosystem.
Course Overview
Key training topics include:
- Understanding the customer’s financial context through the Profit & Loss/Income Statement, Cashflow Statement and Balance Sheet.
- Being a financial detective, using ratios, trends, and benchmarks.
- Selling against the customer’s financial objectives: Understanding the key commercial decisions that customers make at each stage of the Buying Cycle.
- Setting, optimising and negotiating prices.
- The impact of discounting and price concessions on profitability and the price/volume tradeoff.
- The Product / Service mix, and the margin implications of substitutes, upselling and cross-selling.
- Managing direct and indirect costs at an account level; managing scope creep and over-servicing of accounts.
- The Cash Conversion Cycle, account-level cash problems and how to solve them.
Optional modules include:
- Channel Finance.
Impact
Impartaʼs Commercial Acumen Programme will raise your teams’ game. They will be more confident and willing to engage with customers around their financial objectives, and better able to sell against financial needs and to influence decision-making in a financial context.
The impact on the organisation will include:
- Improved opportunity identification.
- Increased pipeline.
- Improved win rates.
- Increased account margin (price, mix and costs).
- Healthier cash flows at the account level.
Secondary benefits include:
- Enhanced confidence and a sense of curiosity about financial issues.
- A higher degree of influence over customers’ strategic initiatives.
- Identification and reduction of profit leakages.
Why Commercial Acumen?
This video explains how Commercial Acumen lets sales professionals achieve important objectives with four main stakeholders, and summarises the key elements of the programme.
Who is it For?
The Commercial Acumen programme has been designed for salespeople, account managers, customer service managers and sales managers (at all levels of seniority) who have a role in discussing financial issues with customers and/or helping to optimise account profitability.
It is suitable for those with no previous financial training, as well as for those who have a good grasp of financial concepts.
It is also applicable to any professional who would benefit from a better understanding of the financial impact of their business decisions, including Learning and Development or Sales Enablement professionals.
Formats and Duration
The programme is part of Imparta’s modular curriculum.
It is available as:
- eLearning (full modules, plus individual assets that can be embedded into playbooks).
- A 2-day instructor-led face-to-face workshop.
- 4 four-hour virtual instructor-led sessions.
- Flipped learning where the classroom is used to focus on application.
- Modules that can be combined with other courses.
The programme also includes competency definitions, application tools, measurement, and reinforcement tools including nudge questions and manager coaching guides to make the new skills stick.
Application Tools
Coaching tools (Canvases) are available in print, editable PDF and Excel versions. They are also available as native Salesforce tools and standalone tools within our platform.
The Canvases help attendees to embed their new skills, and to apply them to winning business and improving account profitability.
Explore the modules
[cjtoolbox name=’Slick Cards ‘]Commercial Acumen opened my eyes to the importance of service mix, the cost of scope creep and the impact of the wrong team shape. I wish I’d done it years ago.
Account Director, Professional Services