Jeff Krimmel

There's some importance nuance around the value proposition piece. There are two common, pretty easy ways to mess this up: 1. Focus only on the merits of your product/service, and not on the value of eliminating the problem it solves for customers 2. Talk about solving customer problems in sweeping generalities, and not on specific pain points that real customers actually feel Human beings will be buying your new product or service. They need to be moved emotionally to make this purchase. A lot of folks will geek out on broad talk around innovation. But you need to establish the commercial merits of what you're building. That comes only through an emotional appeal to customers, backed by the hard technical work you've done.

It's easy when you read "build trust and rapport" to look inward, to ask what you can do to make yourself more trustworthy. At least half the battle, and it's actually considerably more than half, is taking a genuine interest in the person with whom you're trying to connect. You know why you're trying to connect with someone else. But what value do they get from connecting to you? Even if it's a senior executive, and you're a junior employee, you can offer fresh insight from the frontlines that they won't have. Or maybe you've been diving deeply into the competitive landscape of your industry and captured a single well-packaged insight that could be valuable to the executive. Build rapport by offering value, not just capturing it.

The phrase "adjust your goals" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's important to unpack it. There's little chance the career goals you define today will stand the test of time. As you learn new skills, grow your network, and learn more about your industry, your goals will almost inevitably need to change. So please...change them! Do not fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy and stick with old goals just because you're an achiever. In fact, one mark of a good strategist is someone who can pivot when their reality changes. Follow the same advice with your own career. Don't be afraid to adjust your goals as you grow. Your later career self will appreciate the flexibility you show today.

There are plenty off the shelf courses available in this domain. One alternative is to work with a consultant or training provider to build and deliver a custom training course. I've built and delivered just these kinds of courses in the past myself. It's incredibly powerful because you can design a course to meet your folks exactly where they are - use common language, use examples and data specific to your company, steer topics based on the backgrounds of the people attending the workshop, etc. Strategy is so important to get right, and is so easy to get wrong, that it's worth considering the whole range of options here. If an off the shelf solution is a good fit, that's fantastic! If not, you have alternatives.

Spreadsheet software is ubiquitous for a reason - it works. No, it's not the fanciest thing out there. It's harder to manage as your model complexity grows. But it works well for tons and tons of cases. Even for prototyping models that you know will eventually live in a fancy production system somewhere else, spreadsheets can be fantastic for prototyping. Simplify the scenario to its key parameters. Do you care about your revenue trajectory? Over what periods, e.g. weeks, months, quarters, years? Do you want it for the whole company, or for specific segments inside the company? Explore with the spreadsheet to better understand if you even need other tools. In many cases you won't.

While finding an outside course or program can be helpful, don't forget about the power of self-learning. You can follow people in the industry on LinkedIn, paying attention to the words they use and the topics they cover in their posts. You can read the industry reports that the big consulting firms - e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc. - publish on their websites. This will give you a sense of what executive leaders are thinking and talking about. You can also read earnings call transcripts (or listen to the calls themselves) for large publicly traded companies in your industry of choice. Motley Fool, SeekingAlpha, and CapEdge all have transcripts, many of the recent ones being free to access.