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When Salespeople Think Like the CEO
The Domino Effect of Sales Financial Literacy
An Interview with Jeff Aarthun, CEO, Aarthun Performance Group, Ltd.
“…My clients would tell me, time after time, “I want my salespeople to understand the customer’s business.” But the moment I asked about the financial acumen of their salespeople, it was a quick back-track. “No-no. I don’t need them to understand finance – we’ve got people who can do that. I need them to know the business.” I’m sorry, but understanding how customers “keep score” is the cornerstone of understanding their business. Financial acumen should be the foundation for all other sales training….
…When salespeople realize how much impact they can have, it’s not just illuminating, it’s empowering. They change the way they work...Case in point:…Once the salespeople realized how their giveaways contributed to that pain, they came up with multiple ways they could get back that…percent. Their solutions included: holding the line on unearned discounts, showing the value of tech support so that they could charge for it, negotiating better payment terms, and capturing charges for change orders. Twelve months later, operating profit was up…
…Finance can seem like a foreign language, but it’s the language of high-level decision makers. So if you’re serious about calling on them, you’d better be able to speak the language when you get in front of them. Salespeople who speak only the language of products and services, in my experience, get to do so only at the lower levels within their customer’s organization. If they want to get to higher levels, where decisions are made faster and competition is non-existent, then they must embrace this financial language….”
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Financial Intelligence and Employee Commitment
When All Employees Know the Score
By Jeff Aarthun, CEO, Aarthun Performance Group, Ltd.
A Sunday ritual: the fans screaming in unison – impassioned, committed, and utterly clear about who is winning and who is losing and why. Imagine how much your company could achieve if all your employees likewise “knew the score...”
...The challenge for today’s corporate leaders is to get their employees fully involved in the business. To make sure all employees not only know the score, but know how they affect it. To get them excited about and committed to the same goals as management.
…Often our customers must overcome a prime source of doubt – all those “flavor of the month” fads or shifting strategies that emanate from the top but ultimately never get fully executed. Where this has happened time after time, the company starts out each year with a progressively lower level of employee commitment to the new year’s strategy.
…We have seen what can happen when you take an entire workforce and improve their financial literacy. When employees learn more about the business, the strategy, and how they “fit in”, it is transformational. It is not one change, but a series of positive outcomes of increasing value.
…The degree to which people will make a commitment to your vision and strategy is determined by their understanding of your strategy, and the belief that there will be a positive outcome.
…Increasingly, the difference between companies that win and those that lose will depend on whether their employees – from top to bottom – consider themselves known, relevant, and measurable.”
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