Commercial Acumen
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 program 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 analyzing 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 program.
This highly interactive program 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, optimizing, 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 Program 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 organization 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 program.
Who is it For?
This program 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 optimize 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 program is as 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 program 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
Why Commercial Acumen?
Impact: All
Know the importance of Commercial Acumen in helping to understand the customer’s financial context, sell against the customer’s specific financial objectives, and deliver improved deal/account profitability to your own organization.
The Three
Financial Statements
Impact: All
Understand the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement, as they apply to a company but also to an account. Recognise what is within your power to influence.
Being a
Financial Detective
Impact: Leads; Deal Size; Gross Margin
Develop confidence and a sense of curiosity around financial issues. Analyse customers and accounts using a range of techniques including trends, ratios and benchmarks.
Use this to support your sales activities,
and to improve the financial performance
of your accounts.
How customers make financial decisions
Impact: Conversion Rate; Deal Size; Win Rate
Be able to identify the impact of your products and services on the customer’s business model. Understand how they evaluate this financial impact, including the effects of uncertainty and the time value of money (Net Present Value).
Channel Finance
Impact: Conversion Rate; Deal Size; Win Rate
Understand a typical business model for channel partners and how that affects the way they think about buying decisions. Be able to map the benefits you can offer against the channel finance model in order to sell in and drive up share of wallet.
Set Prices
Impact: Gross Margin ; Win Rate
Set prices based on a triangulation of cost, competitor and customer factors. Understand the price waterfall and use a range of techniques to optimise price.
Manage Price/ Volume Trade-offs
Impact: Deal Size; Gross Margin
Understand the Demand Curve and optimise the price/volume trade-off using tiered products and services. Understand the impact of gross margin on your ability
to discount to win business.
Negotiate Prices
Impact: Gross Margin; Net Margin
Create win-win trade-offs between negotiation interests (especially those based on financial objectives), and use win-lose techniques based on BATNA, ZOPA, and Imparta’s FAST framework for responding to customer demands, and/or asking for price increases.
Manage the Product/ Service Mix
Impact: Gross Margin; Net Margin
Understand the impact mix can have on account profitability, and how substitutes, upselling and cross selling can affect blended margins. Use the Cross-Sell/Up-Sell map as a tool to cross-sell and up-sell more effectively.
Manage Costs
Impact: Gross Margin; Net Margin
Identify issues that are causing direct and indirect costs to be too high, and draw on a range of common solutions to reduce them. Use the SCAMPER tool as a way to generate further creative ideas to reduce specific account costs.
Manage Cashflow
Impact: Cashflow
Understand how working capital ties up cash for the business, and the impact that has. Be able to manage the drivers of working capital during the sale, negotiation, and implementation phases.
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
Working with us also means
An annual fee per user gives you access to the whole curriculum, as needed, for around the cost of a single course each year. Even trainer days can be bought on subscription, allowing you to budget ahead and respond quickly as your markets change.
We work with companies across the globe, drawing on over 100 facilitators around the world and our in-house translation team.
Imparta’s i-Coach® platform is an award-winning LMS/LXP that powers each of the 5C use-cases for front-line capability building. Or you can deploy the entire 3D Advantage® Curriculum using your own platform.
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