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Financial Fluency
Sell the financial impact of your offerings
 Program Benefits
Financial Fluency, from The Real Learning Company, gives salespeople the expertise they need to have relevant financial conversations with their customers. This program emphasizes what salespeople need to understand about finance to sell effectively to people with a financial orientation. It is intentionally not a generic discussion of finance for non-finance professionals. Instead, it stays focused on how financial measurements impact customer buying decisions and how salespeople can strengthen their sales efforts by selling the financial impact of their offerings.
Financial Fluency helps salespeople:
- identify the specific financial impacts of the products, services, and other offerings they sell
- learn how customers use financial metrics to make business decisions • demystify the financial terms most important to their customers
- connect financial metrics to customer business challenges
- determine the financial metrics most closely watched by executives and managers in different parts of their customers' organizations
- apply the standard financial ratios considered most important to the customers in the industries they call on
Program Description
Financial Fluency gives salespeople the language they need to sell to high-level executives and others who use corporate financial benchmarks in their buying decisions. It is designed to help participants see how money moves through a business, and it demonstrates how customers keep score of their performance. Highly experiential, the program gives participants the chance to discover how decisions and actions affect the financial scorecard.
Financial Fluency connects with other Real Learning Company sales mastery programs that improve the ability of salespeople to meet the needs of executive buyers. It is built upon the principles of experiential and action learning, and leverages the breakthrough technology of learning maps. In tables of six, teams tap into the full power of their collecting knowledge and experience.
1 - Watching Money Move: Participants build a balance sheet and an income statement. Like the rest of the program, this activity cuts through the clutter and focuses on the balance sheet components that are most important to master: cash, accounts receivable, inventory, equipment, accounts payable, loans, and equity. The income statement emphasis is on gross profit, operating profit, and net profit. To integrate with other Business Insight programs from The Real Learning Company and to help salespeople sell value effectively, the program links these key balance sheet and income statement categories with the customer business challenges most closely connected to them.
2 - Demystifying the Balance Sheet and Income Statement: Participants apply and reinforce their understanding of how the balance sheet and income statement work by tracing the operations of a business. In a 14-week mini- simulation, teams see how business actions and decisions impact the key lines of the balance sheet and income statement. Participants also learn to analyze and predict financial trends. This activity clears up common misconceptions and locks in their learning.
3 - Financial Drivers: Participants now look at the different financial drivers that specific individuals in their customer organizations care most about. This activity explores the financial measurements that align with the roles, interests, and concerns of the top executive and leaders in finance, operations, information technology, and sales.
4 - Three Keys to Profitability: In this activity, participants learn about the three most important ways that one of their company's offerings can positively impact a customer's financial results. The three keys to profitability are:
(1) increasing the customer's sales without increasing their expense base;
(2) reducing the customer's inventory while maintaining its sales; and,
(3) increasing cash flow.
5 - Selling Financial Benefits: Participants apply what they have learned by examining each of the products, services, and offerings they sell in a financial context. They determine which areas of the customer's balance sheet and income statement their offerings most impact, and as a result, which corporate leaders will be most interested in them.
6 - Power Tools: Participants explore key financial ratios for the industries they call on. Power Tools are take-away job aids that allow salespeople to quickly benchmark a customer's performance against standard industry measurements. Using a customized case study (or, if available, an actual customer's financials), participants measure the company's performance against industry standards. Then they explore how their company's offerings can help the customer improve its performance.
Implementation/Customization
Financial Fluency is a one-day program requiring one trained facilitator per five teams of six people each. Power Tools and case studies are customized to the companies on which participants currently call. A particularly powerful approach is to combine the program with Customer Simulation for a two-day experience. Financial Fluency also integrates with the Aligning Value program for a rich, two-day experience.
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