Building People

Acumen Learning has taught business acumen training around the world for fifteen years, helping people understand their business, the impact of their roles, and change their careers for the better.

Our Building Business Acumen® Essentials course equips trainers with the skills to teach the big picture of business, how to align decisions to corporate strategy, and improve engagement among employees.

What is business acumen, and why is it important to your career?

Our customized Building Business Essentials® course will help any professional from any industry understand the big picture of their business, improve their track record of success, align decisions to corporate strategy, fix present problems and prevent new ones, break down communication barriers, take advantage of opportunities to grow, and much more.

So you may be asking yourself — why is having a customized program around business acumen important as you bring it into your organization or your company? Well we would suggest if you're going through and learning how companies make money in theory, that's a lot different than understanding how your company makes money. It's a lot different than understanding your strategy around improving the money making process. It's also important to understand how you stack up against your competition – how you look in the industry. And so as we customize programs for organizations we get really clear on, not just how companies make money generically, but how your company makes money. What's your strategy going forward? What is your historical performance look like? How does that stack up to the competition? How do you compare to your overall industry? And most importantly, what can you do in your role to impact your company's results? And that can only happen if the conversation is really about your organization and how your company makes money. You might think of it as getting an MBA in your own company. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #financialacumen #financialstrategy #MBA #customizedprogram #competition #results

A world-class business acumen course now available online.

Before we jump into the impact business acumen has on sales, let’s define it. Business acumen is the keenness and quickness in understanding and dealing with business risks or opportunities in a manner that is likely to result in a good outcome. Put another way, it’s your ability to optimize financial performance by understanding how all of the individual pieces within an organization work together. For sales teams, to achieve your goals it’s essential to realize that a company and partner’s success are connected. So to be the best partner, it’s essential to have a good understanding of not only your own company’s financial drivers but also have a complete understanding of your customers as well. You need to be able to see the opportunities not only from the perspective of your own company but also from the viewpoint of your customers. With this knowledge, you will be better equipped to develop ideas for your customers with a complete understanding of their struggles or pain points, making it more likely that your customer will agree to move forward with your proposal. During our Building Business Acumen for Sales course, we’ll help you to better understand the five business drivers, achieve alignment with key corporate stakeholders, understand how to present ideas to improve investment, and then how to package those ideas and projected financial outcomes into impactful business cases. By actively participating in this course, you’ll become more proficient in identifying, analyzing, creating, and presenting big growth opportunities to your customers. ✅ Learn more about what business acumen training can do for your sales team at https://www.acumenlearning.com/sales-training ✅ Get more information on Acumen Learning https://www.acumenlearning.com/ ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more business acumen tips and tricks #businessacumen #businessstrategy #salesstrategy #salestraining #learninganddevelopment #sales

Business acumen isn’t just about the financial make-up of companies, it’s about understanding the role you play in your business’s success. Where do you fit into your company’s money-making strategy — and how can you take your career to a higher level by becoming a business leader? Hi, I’m Kevin Cope, and I’ve converted my New York Times bestselling book "Seeing the Big Picture" into an online course accessible to everyone. In this course, you’ll learn the fundamental drivers at the foundation of all companies, and gain skills and vocabulary to not just speak, but think like a CEO. We’ll take you through a two-part course that will first build your foundation with the 5 Business Drivers, and then teach you how to use financial statements so you can discover the trajectory of any company — and receive professional credits on completion. You’ll receive tools and resources you can continually use throughout your career, like the Executive Alignment tool, Quarterly Earnings Call workbook, Action Plan, and more. You’ll also get twelve lessons so you can take your team through a year’s worth of case study activities to expand their business acumen. And finally, you’ll have access to a catalog of earnings call labs where one of our senior financial consultants will teach you how to listen to earnings calls by breaking down Fortune 500 companies’ numbers. Business acumen training is for everyone. Whether you’re a job seeker, entrepreneur, professional, or looking for a customized version of the course for your team, it’s never a bad time to further your career. Today’s the day — get year-long access to SeeingTheBigPicture.com and take charge of your career. I’ll see you in the course. ✅ Visit https://www.seeingthebigpicture.com/ to get access to the online course! (Oh, and we offer discounts for military personnel + their family members, veterans, and students.) ✅ For a copy of "Seeing the Big Picture" visit https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Big-Picture-Business-Credibility/dp/1608322467 ✅ To learn more about us and our online training programs visit https://www.acumenlearning.com/ #businessacumen #businessstrategy #financialacumen #financialstrategy #learninganddevelopment #HR #leadershipdevelopment #training #onlinetraining

We don’t want you to feel like checking your email is a better use of your time than participating in a poorly taught training. That’s why we’ve made a virtual class that’s as much a discussion for you and your peers as it is instruction for your career.

Hear from Waste Connection's leadership on the impact of Acumen Learning's business acumen training.

We get asked a lot about how we define business acumen, so we're here to quickly answer that! Business acumen is a competency that a lot of companies measure their employees on. We would define it as really understanding the fundamental money-making process of your company, and then making sure that your priorities and strategies align with that money-making process. Regardless of the size of the company and the industry, the business acumen fundamentals are the same, and it's important that everyone within the organization understands those fundamentals. If you're a new employee, understanding what you do every day that fits into the bigger picture is really important and brings meaning to your role. Understanding the broader business realities of the organization, allows you to start to put into context what you do every day and the economic value and contribution you bring to the company. It starts to bring some meaning and context perspective to what you do every day in a way that allows you to get excited about what you do every day. ✅ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more Business Acumen videos! ✅ For more on our business acumen training visit: https://www.acumenlearning.com/ #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #businessacumentraining #financialacumen #financialstrategy

Outperform everyone. You need your sales and marketing team to deliver profitable results. Yet most buyers are fed up, tired of reps who don't understand what's driving their business. Building Business Acumen training (BBA) helps sales and marketing teams understand how all the moving parts of a company work together to optimize profitable results for your company and customers. Your customized Building Business Acumen sales and marketing course will establish your team as essential partners to your customers. They'll learn what to listen for, which questions to ask, and how to decipher tricky financial information and ever-changing strategies to win business.

If you're looking to get a job and to exude business acumen in your interview, you'll want to know how the company generates money. What products does it have? What customers does it sell to? Where does it operate? Is it growing or not? How profitable is the company? You'll want to know all those things before you go into the interview to then be able to connect the role that you're interviewing for and how that will ultimately contribute to the company's success in the future. They're not just hiring you just to do the job — although that's going to be important. They’re hiring you to link your job and contribute to the company's success moving forward. Being able to make that linkage point in the interviews on how this role fits to the fundamental direction of the company and its financial performance gives you a much higher likelihood to be hired. They don't just see you as a functional person who understand the functional domain well, but as a part of the bigger picture of the organization’s success. Go to their investor relations website and get a feel for what are the latest messages, latest trends, strategies, and what the company is communicating broadly. You'll also want to understand what its top financial metrics are that they look at to measure success. You'll want to be able to understand not only where the company is now in its performance, but where it's trying to go. As you understand more on where the company is going, you can better position your role and your skills — and then better contribute to the future trends of the company. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #HR #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen #hired #lookingforwork #interview

Business acumen and healthcare aren’t something that we necessarily think about in the same sentence…but they SHOULD be. Acumen Learning’s President, Ben Cook has worked with different facets of the healthcare industry for years, and in this video, he highlights why it’s important that your team has great business acumen. The world of healthcare is complex. And each part of the industry has a different set of priorities they need to focus on in order to succeed. The pharmaceutical and medical device portions of the industry focus on getting innovations to market to drive patient outcomes. Providers focus on operational efficiencies while driving patient impact. The insurance portion of the industry focuses on member advocacy, operational efficiency, and risk management. Regardless of where you are at in the healthcare industry, there is a deep need for better business acumen. Understanding how your organization makes money, how that money is used to further your mission and success, and what each person can do to further impact your organization and your customers is progressively getting more vital given the interdependency of the industry’s constituent parts, the complexity of the regulatory environment, and the global nature of competition and patients’ needs. Competency is now more vital than ever to your success as a leader and as an organization.

So, why does business acumen matter to an organization? Well, I’d suggest that companies don’t improve performance simply because the CEO says that it should. It happens because individuals throughout the organization make really good business decisions. And that only happens when individuals throughout the organization understand how the company makes money. And in their role, they make the right kind of decisions. Decisions that are not only good for them and their department, but also good for the company. Individuals want to know how they matter, how they make a difference, and how they fit in with their organization. In other words, they want that line of sight between their role and the decisions they make, and how it impacts an organization's results. So, people they want to matter, they want to fit in, and I’ve often thought this quote is really relevant around this idea: people work hard for a paycheck, harder for a person, and hardest for a purpose. So, if you really want people’s hearts and minds, their innovation, their mindshare, then help them understand their role in the organization improving company results. It really gives them a sense of how they fit in, and how they matter to the organization. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #HR #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen

Hear from participants of our course on how business acumen training helped them to see the bigger picture of their company.

I’m sure your CIOs and IT leaders are some of the best when it comes to technical know-how but that’s no longer enough if you want to optimize your team in creating growth. Now is the time to optimize IT operational efficiency to drive business value and strategic agility. Hi, I’m Jeff Cope, a Senior Financial Consultant at Acumen Learning, and I’ve had the opportunity to train some of the top technology companies business acumen. When you think IT, you think optimization and performance, but there’s a missed opportunity if companies don’t leverage the talent of their employees in improving the vision, strategy, and action of IT in business outcomes. Imagine what you could accomplish if your teams understood how they fit into the overall strategy of your business. Your IT teams aren’t just support. They’re a critical component — and really backbone — of your company’s success. Why shouldn’t they also be intimately familiar with its big picture? And leveraged in shifting your company towards its goals? With business acumen, your team will better understand how to speak the language of business, allowing them to see how their decisions and ideas will impact the entire company. Not only will this training impact their decision making ability, but it will also allow them to be more effective at presenting meaningful ideas and opportunities at the leadership level. And who doesn’t need more of that in their company?

Strategic agility is the ability to adapt as an organization. As a business you get a very clear direction of your strategy. What am I trying to accomplish? How do I get there? Strategic agility is the ability to see what's going on in your industry. See what's going on with your customers, and be able to make that adaptation. Understand your business well enough to say 'I gotta change' and be able to have the agility, the systems, the processes. Make sure people are on board with you that they can make those changes. The business acumen is what allows you to know 'okay I can see what's going on.' When do I need to change my my strategy? When is it just a little detour I need to take for a period of time? Being able to understand your business allows you to know what decisions you have to make, to change or adapt the strategic direction you're going. The more you understand about your business, understand the competition, understand external factors that impact your business. That's how you can have strategic agility. Otherwise you're just guessing. #businessacumen #businessstrategy #learninganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #strategicagility #HRleadership #financialstrategy #financialacumen #changemanagement