Understanding Business Context
SHOW the 35,000 ft. view!
How do you build an emotionally charged organization that people love to work for? Are your employees and your community shouting how wonderful your company is? Understanding business context is a cornerstone for this way of thinking and it is a Sales Training Driver Foundational Competency. Delivering a training curriculum in sales management should outline the business context of the entire organization. Get Excited!To help Sales Professionals develop sales knowledge and sales skills, they need to understand the "bigger picture". This would include an overview or "framework" of the organization they are representing and how their work impacts business results as outlined from Senior Leadership. Make sure that you are teaching the sales team how to understand organizational cultural behavior, resources and functions as it relates to sales / business operations.
Be a Cheerleader for your Team! Be Passionate about your work!
Understanding the entire business context of your organization will help you sell!
Knowing that you have an entire team of people to stand behind, support, and collaborate with you in every department can be an amazing short story of credibility you can share you're your prospect. To take this deeper, think about how you feel about your High School or University?
Your school is a team collaborative organization with employees who are driving business results! They sell coursework to students and make a profit. Delivering education is big business! Yet, when we look at the overall experience of our "school days", most of us would not be thinking about strategic profit making!
Think about what happens when a student graduates. How does that feel? Is it a positive, emotional experience?Most graduates will yell out the name of their Football Team!Go Gators! Go Bears! Go Tigers! Some of you would defend Your campus experience like it was the BEST place on Earth!The positive attitude and energy from you is so passionate that the other person listening will likely "buy" into the fact that it may very well be a great school! Our workplace should be "feel" like this!
Do you remember your favorite Teacher? (98% of us do!)
Do you feel this way about your boss, Senior Leaders, or CEO? Why don't we?
Something must be good about your place of work that would make you shout to the rooftops about it! Right?
The point is, if you are going to sell a product or service, don't miss an opportunity to be a cheerleader for your company and give support back to the people that make it great!
Your prospect will respect you for it.
The sales person should "see" how each business functions and how employees collaborate with each other. Sales Training Drivers would have you look at the division work flow "upstream, downstream and cross stream." Have them look at the current stakeholder SWOT Analysis.
(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)
- Is employee engagement encouraged for organization wide?
- How are products, services and solutions relevant to the sales process?
- How does the sales outcome impact each employee position?
- What is the perception you give to the buyer about how the company operates?
Understanding business context will help you sell the story.
Here are some Key Points of "Business Context" Training
- What does the "inside" of each department look like?
- What is the organizational culture?
- Is the business operations managed well?
- Is Finance and Accounting practices evaluated by a 3rd party and available for scrutiny?
- What change management processes are in place to handle a business change?
- How do employees behave to each other?
- Is the Human Resources department a friendly and inviting" employee safe place?
- What is the marketing focus?
- What target audience and demographic does the company sell to?
- Who is the competition? What is their strategy?
