The Dangers of Shallow Business and Financial Acumen

Years ago, my wife and I planned a trip to Germany. I’m kind of a language dilettante, so I committed to learning as much German as I could so that I could get the most benefit from the experience. I studied a couple of beginning German books, and listened to cassette tapes (remember those?) during my daily commute. And it worked: I developed a decent repertoire of words and phrases and even had reasonably acceptable pronunciation, so I felt very confident when I got over there.

I almost immediately found out that the level of knowledge I had achieved was actually dangerous: it was good enough to get me into trouble but not good enough to get me out of it. When I would ask someone for directions, they would infer from my question that I spoke better German than I did, and would rattle off a list of directions. I could usually get the first sentence and maybe the second, but then I was totally lost after that—literally and figuratively. So, I would say thank you politely, head in the general direction they told me, and then try to figure it out from there. I soon stopped even trying to talk to people, because I was embarrassed to be found out. My wife, to this day, loves to make fun of the countless hours I wasted!

My shallow knowledge of German didn’t carry critical consequences besides embarrassment and a little confusion, but the consequences of shallow financial and business acumen for sales professionals can be very costly, to you, your company, and your customer.

It’s a commonplace in complex sales to say that salespeople should sell consultatively. Whether you call it challenger selling, insight selling, solution selling, or any other name you choose, it is the most effective way to succeed in the high stakes world of complex B2B sales.

But you can’t really be a consultant without a deep and nuanced understanding of your customer’s business. And if you try to challenge your customers, what happens when they challenge you back?[1] Some companies try to institutionalize this knowledge by creating “playbooks”, scripts and financial calculators that their salespeople can use to support their consultative approach. But what happens when the CFO or some other high-level executive, impressed with their approach so far, scratches beneath the surface and asks them a question they can’t answer?

At best, they may suffer a little embarrassment and loss of time as they admit they don’t know and offer to find out the answer. Of course, many salespeople don’t like to admit they don’t know, so they may try to bluff an answer, which generally ends badly, for the salesperson and for the client. Either way, they run the risk of foreclosing any future opportunity of getting on that person’s calendar again, and maybe even be shut out of the account entirely because the executive feels like he or she has been baited and switched. And if you’re the one who invested a lot of money and effort in the tool that does not get used because the salesperson feels burned by it, what are those costs?

I’m not against these tools. They are extremely useful and should be an integral part of your sales toolkit. But they should be introduced with a solid and deep foundation of fundamental business and financial acumen. At the very least, you need to know what the drivers are of their success, be able to compare their financial performance to their peers, be conversant in the key issues of their industry, and translate the impacts that your solution can deliver into their preferred financial measures and operational metrics. This doesn’t mean that you have to learn enough to go toe-to-toe with the CFO, but you should know enough to know to not only ask better questions, but to actually do something constructive with their answers, unlike a certain lost tourist!

[1] You probably won’t be able to do what Max Planck’s chauffeur did!