Corporate Visions Acquires Executive Conversation

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev., Nov. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading marketing and sales messaging, tools and training company, today announced it has acquired Executive Conversation, Inc., an award-winning business and financial acumen sales training company. This deal further expands Corporate Visions' customer conversation system and makes it the industry's largest provider of consulting and training services for helping companies deliver selling conversations that create more opportunities and win more profitable business. 

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For more than 20 years, Executive Conversation has been helping sales professionals elevate their confidence and credibility when conducting persuasive business and financial conversations with senior decision makers, including C-level executives. This ability has become increasingly important as C-level executives and line-of-business leaders now require business and financial justification for even modest investment decisions. Salespeople must have the financial skills and business know-how to add value during these critical conversations.

"The addition of Executive Conversation will bolster our world-class customer conversation skills training lineup, which will now feature three of the best offerings in the world: Power Messaging, Executive-Focused Selling and Situational Sales Negotiation," said Corporate Visions CEO Joe Terry. "Corporate Visions has focused on creating sales and marketing messaging, tools and skills to break the status quo and create differentiation, while Executive Conversation provides the skills to support the business and financial rationale to validate decisions. Through this acquisition, we now create and deliver a complete approach for conversational selling to our customers."

Jim Melillo, co-founder and chairman of Executive Conversation, added: "Corporate Visions was by far the best fit for our company moving forward. We share the same passion for enabling salespeople to be more effective in their customer conversations and provide complementary offerings that will give companies a more holistic approach to both improving conversation skills and increasing deal-closing impact."

A just-released study by TrainingIndustry.com found that companies rated "understanding customer business needs" as the most important sales training topic. The research also indicated that high-performing companies rate "training on executive selling skills" and "financial acumen" as critical sales skills more than twice as often as average-performing companies do. These results emphasize the importance of the types of skills training provided by Executive Conversation.

"Understanding the best practices of high-performing companies helps other organizations more effectively align their sales skills training," said Ken Taylor, chief operating officer at Training Industry, Inc. "For many years, we've recognized both Executive Conversation and BayGroup International, now a Corporate Visions company, as two of the world's top training companies. Incorporating these complementary curricula into one organization brings tremendous value to the marketplace." 

The Executive Conversation acquisition follows Corporate Visions' acquisition of BayGroup International, the leading negotiations skills training company, in April 2013. The expanded Corporate Visions portfolio now covers a complete customer conversation continuum – from creating value at the beginning of a sales cycle, to confirming that value with executive buyers and capturing it during negotiations.

"B2B selling still comes down to a series of conversations. Early in the sales process, your reps need to be provocative; in the middle, your reps need to build and prove differentiated value; and late in the process, they often have to elevate their conversation to the senior-most executive levels," said Jim Ninivaggi, services director for the sales enablement practice at SiriusDecisions. "Companies that enable their reps with the content and skills to have these conversations will position themselves to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Corporate Visions' recent acquisition of Executive Conversation, and previously BayGroup, positions the company well to offer solutions for each of these different conversations."

The Executive Conversation acquisition was officially completed on Nov. 8, 2013. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. For more information about what this acquisition means for the market, please visit the following page, which includes a 3-minute video presentation: http://cvi.to/1bUAOPO.

About Corporate Visions, Inc.

Corporate Visions, Inc. helps global business-to-business companies create more sales opportunities, win more deals and increase sales profitability by improving the conversations salespeople have with customers. Companies engage Corporate Visions in three key areas:

• Developing differentiated messages that concentrate on customer needs;
• Deploying tools that support critical steps in the buying cycle; and
• Delivering sales skills training that enables salespeople to create, confirm and capture more value.

Corporate Visions helps clients such as ADP, Motorola, Philips, UPS, Cisco and others align marketing and sales with a repeatable approach for creating and delivering winning customer conversations. For more information about Corporate Visions, visit www.corporatevisions.com or call 775-831-1322 or 800-360-SELL.

SOURCE Corporate Visions, Inc.