Between the Lines: Mind Your Client’s Business

David Ramos

There may have been a time when a salesperson simply needed to know the product in order to succeed. That time is no more. Today’s sales professional must understand their prospective client’s business in order to effectively communicate how their own products and services can add measurable business value.  In order to be effective with this, your people need to understand how business functions and how to apply that knowledge.

There are training programs on business acumen, there are many of them advertised everywhere, programs that help you understand the structure of business and how businesses work.  There are Executive MBA programs that one can enroll in to understand how business operates at a strategic, financial and operational level. 

But is that enough?  I don’t think so, because learning doesn’t end with a training program or with a University degree. Both are important, don’t get me wrong, but they are only one piece of the overall continuum.  Sales people need to develop their own ongoing learning program for business acumen. And it is driven by their fervor for solving customer’s problems. Without this desire to solve your customer’s problems by the way, no formal training program will help you.  So if you aren’t into thinking critically, challenging concepts, thinking about new ideas, and looking to find applications for new concepts in your everyday sales world, then this article and learning better business acumen just isn’t for you.

I know some really good sales professionals—I mean really good sales professionals. Here are some of the habits they have formed to be successful and more effective in connecting with their customers and prospects.

• They know how to read and they read a lot!  They read industry publications, they understand the issues their customers and prospects face today and they know their language. I always ask industry groups where I am speaking at their events a question.  “When I was running a division for my last company in Mexico, what do you think one of the requirements for me to have the job?”  That’s right; I had to speak the language.  If you are speaking with IT or a CIO, you better know their language!  If you are speaking with Finance or a CFO, you better know their language! If your vertical market focus is Healthcare, you better….you get my point.
• They know not only their customers information by pouring over investor materials, downloading and actually reading annual reports, and they do this on their customer’s competition as well.
• They know their customers products and services, they understand how they are marketing themselves and positioning themselves in their target market.
• They get inside their customers facilities, they interview how people describe their jobs, how the challenges they face on a daily, weekly and monthly basis affect them.
• They know math.  Sorry guys and gals, but math is required to understand the customer’s situational risk along with the business value of managing those risks. They understand how to apply the business value of the technology or service they are selling to mitigate those risks.
• They are constantly trying to improve their client’s position by trying to understand what it is like to run the company, department or functional area they are responsible for on a daily basis.  They know how to ask the right questions and explore new concepts with their customers.
• They also get involved in industry events or trade shows their clients are involved with to understand what are the trends impacting them the most.
• They are also good at things like networking, professional presentations, products and services, sales process, time and territory management and the like.  But they are really good at teaching themselves about business and when they can’t find the right answers, they have a mentor like relationship with someone they can go to for help and guidance.

Remember this if you only remember one thing from this article. It is your responsibility to learn and no one else’s. If you want to be successful in sales don’t wait for your company to provide you an opportunity/forum to learn, that would limiting to yourself and your talent. 

This topic always reminds me of the line from the movie Good Will Hunting where Will Hunting, a janitor at MIT, who has a gift for mathematics (played by Matt Damon) is in a Harvard bar interacting with a student at the bar who was giving his friend Chuckie (played by Ben Affleck) a hard time. 

“See the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don’t do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.”

About the author: David Ramos is sales operations consultant for Strategy Development, an industry management consulting and advance sales training firm providing sales, service & MPS information, including workshops for the BTA as well as a MPS Sales eLearning program with InfoTrends. He also instructs a selling skills workshop called “Sell With Success”. You can reach him at http://www.strategydevelopment.com/ or ramos@strategydevelopment.com.