Is there a disconnect between company sales efforts and
the training and services HR can provide to sales?
By Matt Damsker
HR Innovator, October 2003
Is there a disconnect between company sales efforts and the training
and services HR can provide to sales? The time may be ripe for HR
to partner with sales in new ways.
Companies with the least bit in common have one big thing in common:
the need to sell their wares and services. Ultimately, the success
of enterprise falls on the shoulder of sales, whether we’re talking
about a traditional sales force that’s out there pounding the pavements
and writing orders or a high-level marketing effort aimed at making
the phones ring.
HR, however, typically hasn’t been about the nuts-and-bolts of
selling so much as the brass tacks of employee recruiting, retaining,
process, and policy. Employee training is designed to touch every
worker in the company, of course, but it’s not uncommon in companies
of any size to have an HR-managed training organization and a separate
sales training organization, with HR on its periphery. The conventional
wisdom is that sales managers know a lot better what they need from
salespeople and prefer to hire their staff without undue input from
HR or anyone else on the “outside.”
That reality may be ripe for a change now that the era of customer
relationship management has brought a more integrated approach to
reaching and keeping buyers. There’s also a growing awareness that
selling is integral to even the most rarified professional efforts.
In consulting firms and law firms, for example, partners and associates
don’t think of themselves as any sort of sales team, but it’s in
the nature of their business to develop client relationships, and
the techniques for doing so are becoming more codified, or should
be. And HR, obviously, can help in that regard.
Randall K. Murphy |
Randall K. Murphy is an innovator in the field of more integrated
sales performance efforts. He is CEO and prime mover of Dallas-based
Acclivus Corp. (www.acclivus.com), which consults on performance
and professional development for a range of large and HR-savvy
companies, such as HP and Verizon. As pioneered by Murphy, Acclivus’
Performance Development System relies on an “R3 Focus” –
Relationships, Revenue, Results – which places heavy emphasis
on customer relationships up and down the corporate line. |
“From an HR perspective, you could say that HR owns all the people
[in an organization], but they don’t own the salespeople quite as
much as they do the other people,” agrees Murphy. “But the hook
for the HR community is that there are a lot of people affecting
customers besides the people in the sales force. And the effect
on the VP of sales and ultimately the sales organization is profound
– whether it’s the interaction of the accounting department
or the training department. In affecting the customer relationship,
they are affecting revenue.”
Murphy’s point is that many people in an organization don’t see
themselves as part of the sales effort and don’t feel very much
in common with their firm’s salespeople. Nor do they generally possess
the skills for making that connection or for problem solving with
clients or customers. Typically, after a prolonged period of sales
strategy, business is won and handed off to people who translate
the needs of clients into a list of specifications, without much
insight into the nature of client expectations or the conversations
that won the business in the first place.
How HR could play a role in improving that dynamic isn’t obvious,
but it’s there. “You wouldn’t start with how HR can help sales sell,”
Murphy offers, “but in implementing a more macrosales effort that
focuses on selling all the way through the decision process and
implementation. Maybe 'sales' isn’t the right word. Looking at it
more from a relationship-results-and-revenue approach would get
the sales department’s attention and give HR more of a role.”
The bottom line is that there’s a need, bubbling under at many
organizations, for a greater level of communication and interaction
among sales and nonsales management and employees. At this most
competitive era of business, the length and quality of customer/client
relationships is at stake as never before. Partnering with sales
to build value for clients could be a golden opportunity for HR.
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