Coffee's for Closers (HR as Sales Professional)

Joe,

As we prepare to invade the North Dakota State SHRM Conference this week, I thought maybe I'd share some of my philosophy regarding why I think all Human Resources professionals should think of themselves as being in sales.

People are often surprised to find that while I now spend my days leading an HR department for an organization of about 800 employees, I have no formal education in Human Resources. As you know, my career started with a job selling copiers in small town rural America. I literally spent my days walking up and down main street of small towns, making cold calls hoping to find someone who might give me a few minutes to talk about copiers or fax machines. I ultimately found my way to HR by way of executive recruitment (another sales job that happens to do with connecting people and jobs). So, when I finally landed as a professional in HR, I viewed it through a sales perspective. Fortunately for me, I think this perspective has played a major role in my success in HR. Here's a few of my thoughts on why.

Sales is about relationships. Sales people spend a lot of time trying to connect to people and get to know them. We were trained in sales to build and leverage relationships to help us make sales. It's easier to buy from someone you know. In HR, most of the really important work we do involves convincing leaders and employees to do something different than what they have in the past, to buy a new way of doing things. We want them to adopt a new performance appraisal or participate in a new wellness program. Whether or not the "buy" into this new program has a lot to do with their relationship with HR. Do they know you? Do they trust you? If the answer to both questions is yes, your new program has a significantly higher probability of success.

Sales is strategic. Sales people know that in order to make a big sale, several people have to say yes and only one person has to say no to stop it. If the sale is big enough, people from several departments and levels of responsibility will have to sign off on it. A sales professional knows this and maps out this process in advance. The sales pro knows who has to say yes, who has the power to say no, and what each person will want to know to make the "buy" decision. HR is no different. Let's use a new HR software purchase as an example. To make the purchase, you may need the approval of your head of HR (if that's not you), the CFO, the IT department, purchasing, legal, etc. A savvy HR pro will lay all of these approvals out on paper and outline what each approver is likely to be looking for. If this HR pro is really good, she probably has established relationships with each of the approvers so she can go to them early in the process to find out what questions each might have. By knowing ahead of time who needs what information to say yes, it's much more likely to get the approval when it's crunch time.

The list goes on. These are two of the biggest reasons I've found how HR pros with sales skills get ahead. You started off in sales like I did, have you found the same to be true?

Jason

More thoughts on Fear of Commitment

Hmmmm.

Nice post, I think this is a very good topic and I think that I agree with pretty much everything that you have said, but I also think there is a bit more to the story. As you are painfully aware, I like to be the "there is always more to the story" guy.

A few things that come to mind for me on this issue:

1.) We need higher level communication and deliberation skills.

I think that for the most part we are not very good at convening, communicating, and decision-making in a way that leads to plans and commitments that are real and connected to the work that we do. I think it is not at all uncommon for a "leadership team" to spend time and money on a retreat and a facilitator to develop plans and commitments, which then get printed (in color and on nice paper), and then get slammed into a three-ring binder, which then gets stacked on top of the book shelf in the corner of our office where it promptly gets forgotten about. I think there are a lot of organizations and a lot of leaders that this applies to.

True story: I got contacted by an organization about 3 months ago to work on a 3-4 month project of guiding them through a strategic planning process and culture building process. My contact was the Executive Director, who had been in place about 6 mos. before contacting me. In between our 3rd and 4th planning conversation she discovered that there was a comprehensive strategic plan already in place. Something is horribly wrong with a strategic plan when nobody knows / remembers that it exists.

I think that this has a lot to do with the fact that we have become very dishonest with our language and conversations in the workplace to the extent that the plans, documents, and language that we produce often means nothing. Spinning, and messaging and bullshitting has become such an exact science that it has removed all meaning and value and reality and humanity from what is said.

So, we end up with people and organizations that a) have plans and goals that are being ignored and / or b) that are resistant to making plans because they have gone through that process repeatedly and the outcome has never been of any real value.

2.) Sometimes plans can be over-rated.

A long, long time ago in a far away galaxy, I was an infantry squad leader in the Marine Corps. We spent a lot of time learning how to make plans, communicate plans, and implement plans. But we spent even more time learning how to "improvise, adapt and overcome", because plans rarely survive contact with reality. Things change. Situations change. People change, priorities change and if an organization is going to be good at developing and following good, solid actionable plans, it also has to be good at supporting its people in understanding what is changing and adapting to those changes. Rigid adherence to a suddenly flawed plan is a good recipe for tragic outcomes. For organizations that are very serious about planning and goal setting, I think it can be easy to place too much faith in a static plan and in goals based on what was true yesterday.

This is becoming increasingly dangerous for business now as we live in a time of great change and change is happening more and more rapidly.

3.) We are wired differently.

One last thing that comes to mind for me is that we are truly wired differently and we function differently. Some of us are all about structure and detail and linear process. Some of us are much more intuitive in nature. I do not think that one is necessarily better or worse than the other, I believe that they both have pros and cons, and I believe we can all benefit from some of both.

I am much less structured than you. I have had my own business for two years now and I do not have a business plan. You would probably not do much of anything without having a business plan in place. Formal plans feel restrictive to me. I am probably not ever going to have a business plan, and I am quite comfortable with that. I am everyday doing work that I love, and my work continues to move in the right direction with more clients and bigger opportunities. I am not saying that organizations or people should not have objectives and plans, but I am saying that they can take a lot of different forms. I operate my business without a formal business plan, but that does not necessarily mean that I am without direction.

For what it is worth. Have a good weekend.

-joe

Fear of Commitment

Joe,

One of the things that continues to perplex me about both individual people and corporations is why the idea of strategy and long term goals are so intimidating. The more experienced I get, the more I've come to realize that running a successful team, organization, or company boils down to three key actions:

• Find and keep passionate, talented people
• Define your purpose so you know why you do what you do
• Clearly outline a strategy so you know where you are going

These seem to me to be obvious and they might be to others as well. The first two, talent and purpose, are areas where companies at least seem to make some efforts (note I didn't say successful efforts) through talent management programs and mission statements. But, I am continually surprised by how few organizations spend the time to have well-defined strategies. Likewise, I seem to encounter very few people on a day to day basis who know where they want to be professionally in 3 years, let alone 10 or more. So, my question is why?

My theory is that it isn't safe to set long range goals. As an individual, if I set a long range goal or strategy and communicate that to others, I'm now bound to make my best efforts to go achieve that. If I fail, I'll have some explaining to do. However, if I don't set long range goals, when I arrive at where ever I end up down the road, I can rationalize that it was where I wanted to be all along. No goals, no explaining, no failure. I think the same thing happens with groups of people. No big goals, no big failures, no explaining to do.

On top of this, setting strategy and long range goals takes work. It's not easy if it's done well. It requires asking tough questions and making some decisions that we'd rather put off.

Have you experienced the same thing, Joe? If so, what is your theory?

-Jason