Financial Acumen – Understanding the Numbers

Understanding the Numbers Will Help You Sell

Every salesperson wants to identify new opportunities, become a trusted client partner, differentiate themselves from the competition and effectively position the value of their solutions. Easier said than done…. but they all have a common component, which is understanding and leveraging a client’s financial information.  This skill set is increasingly referred to as financial acumen. Many of us as sales professionals tend to shy away from developing our financial acumen, focusing instead on our existing areas of strength, such as interpersonal skills.  But many of the most successful sales professionals are those who understand the value of financial acumen and invest in developing their own financial acumen.

Client financial information is one of the most powerful resources we have available.  Leveraging this financial information through financial acumen provides us with the insight to:

  • Identify new client opportunities
  • Prioritize sales efforts
  • Determine executives to target
  • Structure questions to ask
  • Consider solutions to propose
  • Position the financial impact of our solutions

Financial acumen provides us with an opportunity to appreciate our client’s financial challenges.  Financial acumen helps us build credibility and become a client’s trusted adviser.

As sales professionals, we must always remember that the competition is more than other vendors offering similar services.  We are competing against a wide variety of initiatives our client’s organizations are considering, and these initiatives are all vying for a share of limited investment dollars.  Financial acumen gives us the ability to partner with our clients and effectively position the economic value our solutions together, helping our clients position their projects with senior management, acquire the funding needed and pay our commissions!

To learn more about Performance Solutions International’s financial acumen solutions visit our website.

What are your thoughts?

We will be looking at the different financial indicators and how they can help you identify opportunities or support your recommendations in future blogs.  Please let me know if you have any thoughts or recommendations.

About the author

Howard Stein is a co-founding partner at Performance Solutions International (PSI) and works with leading technology companies to help their professionals better understand and engage with key executives.LinkedIn

Performance Solutions International (PSI)

PSI is a leader in performance improvement services designed to provide your professionals with the industry knowledge, insight and tools they need to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment, where understanding a client’s business is a clear differentiator.

Our industry expertise, financial knowledge and instructional design capabilities, coupled with over 25 years of working with leading global solution providers, provides you with a partner who understands your business, your prospects, your solutions and your audience’s perspectives — a partner who can deliver.