Technology continues to impact industry after industry. One highly affected is media. These companies have traditionally sold marketing plans, which would include some mix of radio, newspaper and TV ads. With the introduction of digital ads, these organizations have really had to pivot and learn to adapt, especially because 65% of the digital ad space (and 90% of its growth) is owned by Google and Facebook.
At the 2017 ATD conference, a Sales Development leader from a media organization sought us out to explain his current priority. To combat the disruption in the industry, their leaders have targeted healthcare as having growth potential. As you can imagine, this initiative has multiple phases and requires investment in a number of areas, one of which is sales training.
Sales training is a broad topic, ranging from tactical to strategic. This healthcare sales population has been through product training. They’ve learned about the “new” way of leading with questions and then presenting solutions. We’ve been approached to help with the missing piece: business acumen.
It is imperative that sellers lead conversations with insights about their customer’s business. Long gone are the days of sitting down with a prospect and having them tell you about their business for 30 minutes. We plan to introduce the sellers to general business concepts, build on that knowledge with a deep dive into the businesses of a few select customer categories and then lastly arm the salespeople with the confidence and knowledge to research additional categories.
Once this sales team, most of whom have no business background, increase their business acumen and learn where they need to go to learn more, this client’s business will be set to recognize revenue as a result of this training as early as Q4 of this year.
Interested to learn more about how business acumen can help your sales team exceed expectations? Download our latest eGuide HERE.
