What A Difference A Year Makes For Business Partnering

This is the channel "Trends in Finance and Accounting" and we have now crossed 94,000 subscribers! Click "Subscribe" to receive a notification and an e-mail when I publish new articles on this channel every Thursday and the occasional Saturday.

It was exactly one year and one day ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting in our office together with Michael finishing the last training module for a European manufacturing company. We had a great time and got great customer feedback; however, the pandemic was looming at the back of our minds. Was it going to put a stop to all learning and development activities?

It turned out that we did not have to wait long to get our answer. Already after the Summer holidays did activity start to pick up again. It was like most companies had gone through hardship during Spring and now had a crystal-clear picture of the value that business partnering could bring to their teams. It was clearly a time to invest. 

On one hand, it did not surprise us since we experienced something similar following the financial crisis a decade earlier. However, the pandemic was different since we could not be there physically with the clients to do training. We simply could not be sure if history would repeat itself. Luckily, it did, and the only difference was that everything was done virtually now. 

Same same but virtual 

Even before the pandemic hit, we were already delivering some of our modules virtually, however, when we started BPI we were in doubt about if virtual training could lead to effective learning. We believed that we needed to meet learners face to face to ensure that learnings would stick. 

When delivering training to international companies though they are not going to fly in their teams every month for the next module. Hence, we had to adapt and come up with engaging virtual training. Based on the high customer satisfaction we have seen so far though it seems we are successful also in the virtual world. It is safe to say that our perception of what is possible in a virtual world has changed. We now see how learning can happen effectively virtually, however, you must change how you do things from the face-to-face world to be successful. 

What do we do differently then? Below I have shared a list of tips that we employ in most of our virtual training. 

• Have breaks every hour
• Never talk in a monologue for more than 15 minutes and down to five minutes is recommended
• Use plenty of energizers to keep people engaged
• Involve the audience often through dialogue, surveys, Q&As, etc.
• Use breakouts but plan engaging sessions and not too long
• For longer sessions (5+ hours) use walk’n’talks
• Have two presenters for added variety 

There are many more things you can do to ensure effective virtual training sessions and we are learning all the time ourselves as well. We know that filters will come up almost immediately from participants in a virtual world where you might get 15 minutes in a face-to-face setting. It is very easy for participants to switch off and start to do other things. That is one of the primary reasons that you must do things differently when delivering virtual training. 

Are you ready to invest in your Finance team in 2021? 

It is great to see how many finance teams are currently investing in upskilling their people to make them better business partners. It is clear that the pandemic has offered an opportunity for Finance to have a bigger impact on the company, however, most finance teams have likely also realized that they could have maximized the opportunity even further. 

That is why 2021 is a great occasion to invest in your finance team to leverage the opportunity that has presented itself. When times are bad Finance always has a stronger seat at the table, however, as the situation normalizes to some degree Finance is no longer by default involved in decision-making. Hence, we should continue to provide relevant insights but more importantly, we must use proper influencing skills to make our insights count. 

Through our virtual training programs, we focus on creating customer focus to understand the top priorities of our stakeholders and build strong relationships with them. We also put emphasis on influencing skills themselves through learning more about our own preferences for working and communication and understanding that of others. Lastly, we teach participants how to communicate to executives by using simple communication forms and putting the recommendation first and analysis last. Do not miss the momentum to increase the influence of your finance team so start planning how to do it today! 

Crossing 500,000 views for the first time in a quarter 

It is time for the quarterly update on social media activity and what a quarter it has been! For the first time the blog, consisting of the two newsletters “Trends in Finance and Accounting” and “Here Is The Future of FP&A & Business Partnering”, crossed 500,000 reads in a quarter! Overall, my content has been seen more than 2 million times in the quarter. Below you can see the full report courtesy of SHIELD Analytics.

The blog has quickly grown to be one of the most read blogs on finance and accounting globally. It is a key go-to place for finance and accounting professionals for simple, practical, and actionable insights about the development of the profession. In the past quarter alone more than 16,000 people signed up for one of the two newsletters. See below the full stats for the blog and other related social media metrics.

There are plenty of future milestones to come like crossing 100,000 subscribers on “Trends in Finance and Accounting” and crossing a million reads in a quarter on the blog overall. Not least in the coming quarter, I will see the publishing of my 500th blog post since I started blogging on LinkedIn. If you have any feedback for my content or topics you would like me to write about always feel free to reach out!

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, COO (Chief Operating Officer), and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 9,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company Maersk. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 55.000+ followers.