Exec Summary

• “Business acumen” is a meaningless term
• It’s too general and without any nuance
• Instead, reps need:
  • Domain Knowledge
  • Specialized Expertise
• How do you develop this in your reps?
  • Focused territories
  • Focused segments
  • Focused marketing
  • Focused training & enablement
• The processes you have in place determine your success as a sales leader
• We can help you build a high-success environment for your sales team
• Curious how? Let’s talk!

Ask most CROs and sales leaders what the key skill is for salespeople and many will say “business acumen.”

The idea is that the reps with the most business acumen can understand customers better and close more (and bigger) deals. It’s what separates good from great salespeople.

It’s also complete bullshit.

“Business acumen” is one of the most meaningless terms in business. It implies that one understands business. WTF does that mean exactly?

• They understand how a B2B SaaS company sells to SMB customers?
• They understand how oil companies discover and develop new oil fields?
• They understand how hospitals leverage data to improve patient outcomes?

I hate to break it to you, but there’s no one on earth that understands all of this with any depth whatsoever.

Instead, here’s what these CROs really mean…

Domain Knowledge

Customers don’t want “business acumen”. They want specific domain knowledge. The people that work in companies and make buying decisions just want to succeed in their jobs. If they can buy from someone that has done their job before and achieved the outcomes they want, they will buy from them.

If they can’t, the next best thing is to buy from someone who has worked with lots of people that have done this, that understands what they do, how they do it, and can share stories about common challenges and solutions from people just like them.

Specialized Expertise

More than this, customers want a unique perspective. They want specialized expertise.

When I was in my late 20s I sold ~$50 million dollar investments into PE and VC funds to professional investors managing +$10 billion of capital. Talk about intimidating! How does a 28 year old salesperson possibly add value to a 58 year old investor that has spent all day, every day, the past 30 years, evaluating, buying and managing the investments I was selling?

I remember asking this exact question and the answer blew me away.

“This guy might have 30 years of experience and has forgotten more about investing than I will ever learn. However, has he spoken to 45 different lower middle market healthcare funds in the past 12 months? I have – and I’ve learned a lot from this that I can share with him.”

Focused Territories

So how do we build a sales team capable of acquiring this domain knowledge and specialized expertise?

We start with focus. If we have reps covering B2B SaaS and Healthcare and Oil & Gas, they’ll never stand a chance. I know because I covered all three of these industries and three dozen more as an AE at Salesforce.

Fortunately for me, my territory was rich with B2B SaaS and I could afford to invest most of my energy there. The rest… I just fumbled my way through.

This is why it’s so important to build focused territories.

We start by carefully defining the ICP and Buyer Personas, going much deeper than just industry and revenue, looking for any and every way we can describe the best customers we have today and how to identify the best prospects for tomorrow.

Then we do a Capacity Plan to measure exactly how many accounts a rep can handle without skipping any steps. This enables us to create Territories with the exact number reps can manage and pick the absolute best accounts to focus on.

(Need help executing on this yourself? Let’s talk.)

Focused Segments

In an ideal world our ICP would include just one very specific type of company – but this is obviously not realistic for every company and every product. When reps have to cover multiple different types of companies, segmentation is incredibly important.

Even when only covering one industry or company type, we will still likely have different Buyer Personas to target. By creating segments (each containing just one company type and one Buyer Persona), our reps can spend an hour, a day, or a month focused on one at a time.

This will dramatically improve their ability to learn the ins and outs of the buyer’s job and how their company operates.

Focused Marketing

In line with this, we need to have the same focus in marketing.

I remember speaking to my EVP about this at Salesforce. We would kill ourselves trying to build a case for a B2B SaaS CRO to attend a Salesforce event – only for them to show up and see some big presentation on how Coca Cola was using Salesforce to get more products into convenience stores.

Thankfully, my EVP advocated for us and pushed marketing to provide more support and more relevant content for our audience. The more reps can leverage marketing content that hits home on the pain points in these specific segments, the faster they will be able to speak the customers’ language.

Focused Training and Enablement

Lastly, training and enablement need to align with this. Once we have reps focused on a select set of similar buyers with strong marketing content to support them, we need to align our training and enablement as well.

As an organization, we need to understand our customers and educate our reps on the ins and outs of their jobs. Of course, the best salespeople will learn this on their own, but it’s not an efficient use of company resources to have each rep reinventing the wheel.