Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
101. Sales Meets HR: A Dynamic Partnership for Success with Brian Soudant
At the crossroads of sales and human resources lies a dynamic potential for strategic partnership that can yield significant benefits for any organization. In a compelling new episode of our podcast, we delve into the multifaceted relationship between these two essential departments, uncovering how the synergy between sales leaders and HR professionals can radically elevate recruiting, training, and culture within sales organizations.
Often perceived as opposing forces, sales teams and HR can forge a powerful alliance based on shared objectives. Our expert guest guides us through the practicalities of this partnership, revealing how clear communication about candidate needs can transform the recruiting process. By advocating for their needs, sales managers can empower HR to find the right talent, leading to more successful hires and enhanced team productivity.
The episode doesn’t stop there; we also discuss the critical nature of continuous professional development in sales. With the rapidly changing landscape of business, the need for ongoing training is necessary for maintaining competitive advantage. Our conversation touches on effective ways in which HR can support this continuous learning process—not just through onboarding but by fostering a robust mentorship culture. Listeners will gain actionable insights into how mentorship programs can be structured and sustained, thereby nurturing talent from within.
As the discussion unfolds, we explore the concept of sales enablement and its integration into the hiring process. The dialogue emphasizes that sales enablement should not merely be a superficial post-hire framework but a foundational ingredient woven throughout the recruitment and onboarding stages.
Through a candid examination of both successes and challenges, this episode illustrates that the pathway to a better workplace lies in the strength of bonds across departments. It appeals to both HR practitioners and sales forces who are keen on building more robust connections for long-term success.
If you're engaged in sales or HR, or if you're simply looking to enhance your recruiting and talent management strategies, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights that could reshape your approach and drive measurable outcomes.
Join us for a deep dive into this essential conversation, and discover how to build a seamless partnership that promotes excellence in hiring and employee growth. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review to share your thoughts!
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go, brian. We're going to talk about HR today. This is going to be interesting because we want to figure out how can the sales team leverage HR, how can HR more closely partner with sales organizations from recruiting to professional development and all of those things. I think it's especially interesting because we know of these short tenures that a lot of people in sales and sales leadership have. Maybe there's a way to impact those, because, after all, that's what we all thought HR was there for when we studied it early on, and it doesn't always work out that way.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you for having me. Yeah, this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I think that, unfortunately, a lot of times when people in sales whether it's individual contributors or leaders when they think about HR, they sometimes too many moans and groans right when they should really be thinking about hey, how is this another strategic partner that can help the sales organization be effective, be impactful in the marketplace? And it ranges from recruiting to training and staff development and also kind of being a trusted aid when those kind of pesky HR things come up where you need conflict resolution or other workplace matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's start with recruiting, because I think that's something where a lot of times the complaints I hear from sales leaders are oh, I get pushed to the back of the line because engineering has a need.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Or so that's on the internal recruiting side. On the external recruiting side, people posting things on LinkedIn and saying, no, we don't use external recruiters because heaven forbid you'd use a professional to fill your role. So talk to me a little bit about your view on the general state of internal recruiting and some of the opportunities that you think that that group might have to partner better with sales organizations.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I think there's a lot to be considered. I think one of the things that you have to think about is are your recruiters recruiters or are they, you know, resume traffic cops for you, right, as the hiring manager? Oh that's funny.
Speaker 1:It's like a sorting machine that sorts out the good ones and bad ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Like. Do they actually do recruiting or are they just waiting for the you know, for the applicants to come to them? Right, if you think about you know a recruiter of a college football team? Right, they're going out there and actively trying to find the best talent to bring on to their college football team.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and they're in the living room with the parents giving the pitch. They're not just saying, hey, I've got this thing. Would you like to interview with the coach?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what's funny about recruiters the good ones they're selling right. So they sometimes need to be taught how to sell to candidates because for some of the best candidates out there, they're going to need to be sold on the idea that they should leave their current organization and come join a new organization. So I think at the heart of it, at the highest level, is what do you want your recruiters to actually be? If a hiring manager just wants, hey look, I'll review the resumes and I'll take it from here, then that's one approach you can take. I don't think it's the most fruitful approach and one that will actually get you the best talent.
Speaker 2:So I think at the heart of it, that's kind of you know, what tone and strategy does this hiring manager want to set with their recruiters and recruiters? You know they are a shared service organization so they, to your point, they're going to have people in marketing and finance and operations and engineering who have needs and you know they're going to recruiters are going to go to. You know they're naturally going to go to those functions that are sometimes the loudest, sometimes the most organized but also have the strongest spirit of partnership. And there's also that top-down focus that's going to come from the executive team on hey, what roles do we actually need to go fill first? So I think that's one thing that the sales folks need to realize. To your point, they're one of many mouths to feed, or brains to feed, in the recruiting process for an organization. And how you interact, partnership mindset, and how do you think about really helping them achieve your business objectives and educate the recruiters on what you need, I think is sometimes a huge miss, but I think a lot of times-.
Speaker 1:Well, educate on what you need is good, because I think the background, the educational history, is different than other roles in the company. And then the phone screen is definitely different than others in the company, if you do it right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and I think that's you know what is your ideal candidate profile look like? What are the some of the big watchouts, what are some of the other organizations from a work history you might want to see? And then, yeah, what are those questions in the screening process that that first you know the recruiter can do initially, and that's actually a great conversation to have? Hey, yeah, what are those questions in the screening process that first the recruiter can do initially, and that's actually a great conversation to have? Hey, I would like you to ask these five questions, right, and these are the things that we are looking for from an answer standpoint. Now, some of those are very transactional when are you at in your current role? Are you relocatable, or what is your comp expectations, that type of thing. But there could be some other things that you're looking for from a skillset or a personality fit that the recruiter can kind of help, you know, screen people out initially.
Speaker 1:Well, when you're interviewing salespeople, you want to see can they ask questions? Are they concise? Are they going to go for the close? At least ask what the next step is at the end of the meeting. And if the recruiter does what they often do with other roles, which isn't you know, you don't have to do the things I just described when you're hiring somebody as a backend software developer. But if you paint the picture of what all the steps are, you miss the opportunity to see if the salesperson is going to take it upon themselves to do it or not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, is the salesperson using their prospecting skills, their discovery skills, right? I mean, it's something that you're going to see, you, right, I mean it's something that you're going to see. You want to see the core competencies of the role in action, and certainly communication is part of that. But also you know asking for the order, driving things to a close, understanding next steps, understanding the players that are involved. You know, in terms of getting getting to a yes, and it's recruiting is, it is the ultimate sale, if you think about it, you know which we can. We can talk a little bit more about, but I think that sometimes you know initially, you know the, if those initial calls are just a, you know temperature check and you know they can sometimes lead to inefficiencies further down the process from a recruiting standpoint.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think every sales manager has been frustrated, where they get on a call with a candidate and they're like good Lord, this person should have been screened out already, right?
Speaker 1:You know what happened on that initial call.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think anybody that's listening to this that has the authority to do so make sure that you've got that ideal candidate profile written down, you've got the interview questions written down and you've got any tactics, such as let the candidate go for the close instead of us push the close and structure that interview process in a way that feeds you who you want and then, at the same time I think it's interesting A lot of folks aren't screening out for things like college degrees anymore, which for many sales roles, makes sense. You probably don't want your surgical implant salesperson not having an engineering degree, but if you're selling a web app that's on top of a database, I don't see how college is necessary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's part of the journey of discovery. On, some of those initial calls is like hey, take me through your educational background. Or hey, it's a fair question. Like, hey, I see you didn't go to college. What did you do to improve your sales skills? And sometimes those are the most interesting people that you come across as people who said, look, I wanted to find ways to grow and develop myself and I took an alternate route rather than a four-year degree, and here's what I landed at and here's what I've been able to do. And that's where creativity and intellectual curiosity, hard work, scrappiness can all kind of you know, kind of come through. So there are exceptions to every rule. But yeah, there there is that ideal client, you know, or ideal, you know, higher profile that you're looking for.
Speaker 1:I know a guy people listening to this know him too. Some of you. I won't say his name, though, but when he was 14, he got a job at a Chinese restaurant and he lied about his age, and then he got recruited away to work at a call center. So he was 14 being an SDR.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think probably happens as much these days, but it definitely happened back then. I you know it was interesting. I interviewed a candidate once and I said, take me back on your work history as far as you want to go. And he told me you know that he was, you know, mowing neighbor's lawns when he was 10 years old, right? And then he spent actually like a little almost I felt like it was an almost an inordinate amount of time talking about his jobs up until he was like 22 years old, but what it signaled to me it was like this person actually had a lot of work ethic inside of them.
Speaker 2:They like work right. They genuinely enjoy-.
Speaker 1:Because they didn't have to back then probably.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, exactly, but yeah, I think it's a fascinating topic.
Speaker 2:Um, but yeah, I think it's, uh, it's, it's a fascinating topic and I think the um, you know sales people can be intimidating at times to other departments inside of an organization.
Speaker 2:They tend to be aggressive, they tend to ask for things, they tend to challenge things, um, and you want to make sure that you're kind of meeting that recruiter where they're at in terms of how they want to think about, uh, you know, going into the market and also understanding what is their capacity how much time can they actually devote to the recruiting process and asking questions like hey, how many searches are you working on right now? How would you rate this search in terms of complexity from a getting the right candidate and screening standpoint? Or, hey, what are your priorities from? I know you work with three different departments what are your priorities right now from a fill standpoint? Or what is the executive leadership team prioritizing from their end? Because they do get pulled in a lot of different directions. I mean, because they're a service organization, they want to provide a high level of service to all their clients and I think sometimes that's where things can get a little squirrely between sales leaders and recruiters, when they don't recognize all the other complexities involved.
Speaker 1:And some of them do. But at the same time, internal service organizations are held to a standard by a person, and if that person doesn't hold them to the standard, then some of them might want to provide higher levels of service. But if the only thing that they get compensated on, or the only thing they get held accountable to, is those really special roles, the executive search roles, the technical roles, whatever it is, do they actually care that the sales development team has eight people out of 10?
Speaker 2:Correct. Yeah, it could be a huge, huge disconnect. I think organizational norms around speed to fill or quality of filling roles is incredibly important and I think there needs to be a shared. So I'll give you an example. I worked at a beverage company and there was this internal goal that said we need to have all goals filled in 60 days. And if the goal, if the role, isn't filled in 60 days, the call is actually going to go to the hiring manager to say, hey, why isn't this role filled? Right, this is your team, you're responsible for filling it. And then they're going to call the recruiter. Right, and sometimes that can change a little bit. But when you have this arm and arm shared goal that says, hey, we need to achieve X by Y date, that can be very powerful in both sides saying, hey, look, we're a team here, we're both going to get the phone call if things don't get filled in time. And if they're not, we just need to have a really clear understanding as to why that's the case.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, there's double accountability on the sales leaders part, because they're also missing quota capacity at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's ramp up time and there's, and then the risk of getting a hire wrong in sales is huge, right, because you can have a lot of misplaced training time, onboarding time, et cetera. You have a missed revenue opportunity. You have to have an exit strategy. I mean, you get the higher wrong in sales, it could hog a headcount spot for a year.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about that from a slightly different angle for a second, from the sales enablement perspective. So a lot of times sales enablement is charged with onboarding and ramping folks, but they don't always have a seat at the table when it comes to hiring and they pretty much never have no authority to be able to give somebody a thumbs down and block a hire. So you're effectively giving somebody the responsibility of onboarding somebody that they did not have the authority to either approve or veto. Thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I think that getting the candidate interview team set up is something that's very important and obviously the recruiter is going to be involved, the hiring manager is going to be involved. But how, when and why do you pull in other people into the interview process to evaluate a candidate? I think is really important. Sometimes, when you get somebody involved in the interview process, that's kind of one rung removed or two rungs removed from the implications of hiring that person. Sometimes they can be the most unbiased evaluator of a talent, of a hire, to say, hey, look, here's what I picked up on the interview that I liked and here's what I didn't like. And then if you bring in that sales enablement person, they can say, hey, look, we think this person might struggle with this part of the onboarding process or this part of the job, or they might actually do really well here.
Speaker 2:No candidate's going to be perfect, right. So I mean, there are those unicorns out there, but it's also a heads up that when you do bring into somebody in the organization they might say, hey, look, they struggle. You know, we picked up a little bit in their interview process that they might sometimes struggle with prioritization or they sometimes might struggle with asking for help, or they might struggle with, you know, pulling others into the selling process when needed, and those are things that you know can be flagged during an interview process. They may not be a deal breaker right there just might be like hey, like you might, you might recruit a running back who's not really great at catching the ball out of the backfield, so that might be, everybody's going to have their issues.
Speaker 1:Your own, your own player on Madden. Everybody else is going to have their issues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Right. So so I think part of that, when you bring in sales enablement, they can kind of be an unbiased voice. But then when you say, all right, we are going to move forward with this person, everyone knows what they're walking into and what that can look like. But you also, you know, sometimes we can forget. You know there could be historical examples or other reference points that get forgotten about. That can be brought up by. You know somebody in sales enablement or sales ops or even a different part of the company. I've seen it in some cases where you know again, I worked at a beverage company once where we pull in people from the warehouse, from the operations team, to, hey, you know, spend 30 minutes with this candidate.
Speaker 2:Let us know what you think, and sometimes that's for cultural fit, but it's also, you know, from a you know, creating an unbiased perspective. So I think that that's another thing to think about. More opinions are sometimes going to be too much, but you get that right person involved in the interview process and that can be helpful. And then that's also something that the recruiter should have a voice on. Is like all right, what is this committee going to look like in terms of who's being involved in evaluating a new hire?
Speaker 1:You got to train those people on how to interview, though, because otherwise you just stick them in a room and you got somebody that's never interviewed before. They don't know what to do. They watch TV shows. They say well, how does Harvey Specter interview people? And that's going to be wild.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and those are things that a recruiter can actually provide some leadership on early on in the process is understanding, hey, who's a good interviewer, who's a bad interviewer. And then also, you know, if you're going to run a candidate through five interviews, maybe they're on five different topics and what does that look like? You know this interviewer is going to focus on topic A. This interviewer is going to interview on topic B. But you're right, corey, there are so many organizations they don't take the time to teach the basics around interviewing.
Speaker 1:Just assume you're born with it. You're not. It's wild. And if anybody out there is thinking, geez, how do I do that, if you want to interviewing and hiring workbook, shoot me a note. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom. I said no long ads. I didn't say no ads. All right, let's move on from the recruiting piece and talk a little bit about HR and the role. And even if they do, it's rudimentary. You don't go and have a quota. You might do some exercises and get a feel for it to some extent, but it's more like playing video games as opposed to actually playing the sport. And then all of a sudden you're in the role and you're playing the operations and finance and marketing do have, because there's just a greater corpus of theory and centuries of work around those types of things, whereas sales, for the most part, there's not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. Well, just real quick, we have 4,000 universities in the United States and only 200 teach any type of curriculum related to sales, right you know? Huge opportunity, I think, for higher education to lean in on that area. Right, that could be for another podcast, I know.
Speaker 1:I talked to my alma mater about it and they basically told me that I don't want to put words in their mouth, but it wasn't as academic of a subject as they wanted it to be and I said look, it's just an intersection of the business school and the psychology department. You all should do it, and they're too fancy to do that, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I taught at a. I taught, actually, a class to undergraduates on sales and customer relations at a local UMass University of Massachusetts campus and the students loved it. They're like this is great, this is actually tangible training and I can show up in an interview now and talk prospecting and discovery and close rates and CRM systems and you know, et cetera. But I do think, just going back to your question about what can HR do, I think HR is all about you know how do you have a training program and what does that look like? And the training can't, you know, end at the end of onboarding. There needs to be continuous, ongoing training as the business needs change, as the competitive set changes, as the product lines change inside of an organization, and it doesn't need to be.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of different ways you can do training. You can say, all right, four times a year we're going to pull everybody off the streets for a week and do this intense training you could do. Hey, I worked at a. I did some consulting with a company where they did training Tuesdays, when every Tuesday morning for an hour they did, you know, a training session and everybody jumped on and it was just became a way of working, but developing that curriculum to understand what are the skill sets we want to see improved, what's important to the role, but also circulating real world examples of where things worked and where things didn't work. And sometimes that's the role of the sales manager, but also it could be, you know, from a standpoint of HR.
Speaker 2:But you know where do you need to upskill, where do you need to have training? It could be training programs. There's a lot of different ways to do that. I also think one of the more effective things I've seen is HR taking the lead on mentorship programs and building out a mentorship program and making sure it sticks and actually gets executed. A lot of mentoring programs just they fizzle, they die in the vine, nothing ever comes of it. But how can you create some structure where you have a two-sided platform of mentoring the people in the organization who want to be mentors and the people who want to be mentees? Right, and you know it may not be for everybody, but for the people that really want to have that type of relationship. How can you play matchmaker and coach to that type of?
Speaker 1:thing. So how do you keep that going beyond that initial spark? Because I think there's probably a lot of people that say I want to mentor or I want to be mentored. How do you make sure that, seven months in, that's still working?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, you have to have someone that's in charge of collecting all the data around how the organization is performing on mentoring. So I think you could have a situation where, all right, we're going to do a six-month mentoring sprint and you go through a process where you have, maybe, senior leaders who raise their hand I want to be a mentor. And then you have junior level people who say I want to have a mentor. And then you have a way of checking in on those relationships. Over the last six months, have you two connected? Are you in touch? What is working, what is not working? And then at the end of the six months you go back and collect more data. That could be through a quick survey, it could be through some kind of reach outs hey, what worked, what didn't work?
Speaker 2:What my experience has been on those relationships is that the senior person, the mentor, they really need to start that mentoring engine. They need to drive those initial actions. Quite often, you know the mentors are, you know, more senior. Their time is more guarded. They may not have the capacity, the ability and they can also be a little intimidating to the person that is, you know, junior.
Speaker 1:I was once told my gray hairs on my side are scary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Right. Or they're worried about like and then how do you build the trust in the mentoring relationship that like, look you can come to me with your uglies.
Speaker 2:You can come to me with your problems, right, and there's a delicate balance there because if there's ever something that's communicated that is that needs to be addressed in the workplace, right, it's on the mentor to make sure that gets addressed properly. But you know, I think that's also something that over time, you know, go through a few years you could have, you know, someone that's had a couple of mentors in the organization and it's just, it's another way to get feedback, advice and support. That's outside of your kind of day-to-day, you know, line manager. But I think HR, you need to have someone that's passionate about that, who wants to create the environment that the individuals that want to participate can participate and find it helpful.
Speaker 2:And then you build it over time. You know, at the close of every you know mentoring period, you know what worked, what didn't. How do you, you know, improve it upon, you know, next time around?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and beyond the obvious benefits, it seems like it'd be a great recruiting tool. Hey, come join this company. Take a look at what we've got here. Here's a couple of stories where we match this person with this person, and that's a good. It's a reason why somebody might want to join, or it might be a tiebreaker if they were torn between your company and somebody else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you think about it. Right, I keep using sports analogies. But if you were to go sign up for a gym, right, yes, you know the gym and you know the equipment in there. But you want to know, like, hey, what are the classes I'm going to be able to take? What are your trainers like? What do you have envisioned for the future? What is this going to look like? How am I going to? Am I going to be on an island for my own development or what is the company going to do to help me?
Speaker 2:You know, moving forward, what are the ways that I'm going to be evaluated from a critical standpoint? And those can shine through with values and mission as you go through the recruiting process. But I think it's also understanding that what are the KPIs that are going to be used? Hr should have some awareness, some input onto that. But thinking about regular check-ins that go beyond quotas and focusing on development and sometimes those new hires that you bring into the organization, how they develop, is a reflection of the day-to-day manager. But also, you know, where do you need to train the trainers? Where do you need to train, provide manager training? And is this, do you find you know it's the will or the skill. Challenge at times, right Are people that are underperforming. Is it because they're not seeking to improve or do they not have the skills and haven't been taught or trained properly to to to be successful in the role?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the first step of coaching. You got diagnosed what type of challenge you're facing, because you can't coach a skillset challenge the same as a mindset challenge.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, no, a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:So the first thing, go, look and see. Can they do it? If you've never seen them do it before, well, you got to see them do it. Before we start thinking it's a mindset, challenge, Test that skill, set ability and can they do? It has a few layers. Can they do it, can they do it well, and then can they do it well under pressure, because there are people that can do things well if they're sitting in the room with somebody they're comfortable with. But the minute you put them on with the most senior person, their most important prospect, a little nervous.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me ask you a question on I want to get your thoughts on on mentoring, what do you think about? You know, compensated mentoring relationships, right, where you say to a salesperson like, congratulations, you've been accepted into our mentoring program, right, the expectations is you're gonna you're gonna do x amount of hours per month over the course of a year in helping develop this person and because of that at the end of the year you're going to be compensated. You know it could be a couple thousand dollars, whatever the number is. Yeah, you know it should be one of those things. You want people to do it. But in sales organizations where time is money, right, and you're like, why would I want to go offline for an hour to develop some junior person, I know. What are your thoughts on that? Have you seen that used in other organizations? Or thoughts on these other kind of training type roles?
Speaker 1:Well, people don't want to do anything. That's the first part, and especially if they're sitting in there, if they're doing remote work, so if it's one of those remote companies, if you're in the office and you're going to mentor, okay cool, I'm going to stay for an extra 15 or 30 minutes, and so I'll be a little late for dinner or whatever, because I know some people eat dinner early. I like eating dinner at 10 o'clock, but that's me. But if you're sitting there working from home, you're physically looking at your kids and you're saying I'm going to not go talk to them right now because I'm going to have this mentor conversation, so I think there's a much bigger barrier to entry. So, especially in a situation like that, something like compensation makes sense.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you that the two best mentors I've ever had I paid for so, and that was for me being the mentee and they were getting paid. So I guess that makes sense, right. They invested some time with me. We had a contractual relationship and it wasn't necessarily inside the company thing, it was an external coaching deal. But same thing, yeah, money motivates people, and especially folks that are in their prime earning years. That's what they're doing. If somebody is retired or semi-retired, you're probably more likely to be able to get them to give up some time and things like that. But they're not. You know, by definition, they're not going to be one of the executives inside of your company. So I think that compensation is good, compensation is important and, generally speaking, you get what you pay for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think with HR it's also. The other thing is you know when things go wrong or there's an underperformer, you know how do you spot that early, flag it to HR and say, all right, let's get on the same page here about what the path forward is here. And I think the earlier and more often that's flagged the better and that should come out of regular, you know communication with your HR business partner or your you know whoever your contact is is in HR and try to understand hey, are things actually fixable here, or are we heading to a place where you have to coach somebody out, or you know you know, you know, moving towards it, moving towards a termination.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the frustrations I've seen is when you know HR says this is the. This has been going on for weeks or months and this is the first I've heard about this Like what, what you know? What's the case here? So it's really about taking that relationship from I think from an ad hoc. I'm going to call you when I need something. Relationship to a strategic partner, just like my finance person does in ensuring that we are delivering profitability, just like my product development person does making sure that we're getting the best products right. You're part of the success in the engine of the sales organization which ultimately drives revenue for the company. So HR has a hugely vested interest in a high-performing sales organization.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I think the foundation for that is you've got to have a good competency rubric defining what good looks like, so what is expected of the person. I think the foundation for that is you've got to have a good competency rubric defining what good looks like, so what is expected of the person. I think the mistake a lot of folks make is they make a job description. They use it as a recruiting tool or, as you brought up earlier on, a sorting tool. This one goes right, this one goes left. It's like the baggage at the airport. The bag is at the airport and then they look at it again and all of a sudden you've got this person in this role. You look back six months later and you say wait a second. And the job description that we had outlined, these 12 things, we're doing three of them. What's going on? And it's because there's no rigor put into place post-hiring. So the companies that have this competency matrix.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you what I've come up with. I'm curious what your thoughts are. There's lots of different ways to do it. You could do the one to five scale, but the challenge with one to five scale is what's the difference between a three and a four. The objective person can't do that and it's why, when you look at how companies do software development and they build stories and assign effort levels to things, they use Fibonacci numbers because they're nonlinear and human beings are unable to distinguish between things like the difference between a two and a three or difference between a three and a four.
Speaker 1:So the way that that we've started working on this and if anybody wants to take a look at it, free stuff at coach crm, free stuff at coach crmcom the five levels either they're not trained on it, below expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations and best in class. And let me let me talk through why. Why we settled on that, and I I was making fun of the one to five. This is really well defined one to five, so not trained on it. This means that they're not eligible to be rated below expectations. They're not there yet.
Speaker 1:Meets expectations. And then I wanted to have two levels above meets expectations, because that seeds expectations, is they're doing great, best in class is that is the best person on the team, or that is the definition of the best person that we've ever had in this role before. So there you've got almost everybody, if not everybody, at a level where they still have upside and they don't think that they made it. And you're demonstrating and for each one of these items, depending on what the topic is, you're defining what it means for that topic to be at that level. That's the thought you want to jam on that for a second.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I think that one of the interesting. So I love the framework and I love the way you're thinking about it. What I found value in is having somebody evaluate themselves.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, Say, hey where do you?
Speaker 2:where do you think you actually we're going to go into two rooms here. I'm going to fill it out for you and you're going to fill it out for yourself, Right, and let's think about you know. You know, whatever the competency is, Right, and quite often you're going to be more aligned than you are disconnected on things, Right. When you ask people to quit, and you've what I've done is forced ranking is like hey, you have these nine competencies, three go high, three go middle, three go low Right, and you know bucket these, you know bucket them, Right. And then you could, you could talk about the methodology of bucketing, but then you come back and you say, all right, of these nine, you know competencies, gosh we're aligned on two that we got to get moving on with you, right, and let's plan together to do that.
Speaker 2:And then it's the person's self awareness and, by the way, it's a great way to examine does somebody have good self-awareness in their evaluation of themselves? But if you can make it to be their idea that, like, hey, I need to get better at prospecting right, or I need to get better at negotiation Great, we've landed on that. Let's put a plan together and move you ahead, then as a manager, right. You can take and stack your six or seven or eight direct reports and be like good gosh, the whole team stinks at this one competency, or we're really good here, right. And then you can take that back to HR and say, hey, look, we need a quick solve here on this, and what does that look like?
Speaker 2:But I do love the bucketing of things and I think best in class. There should always be a North Star that everybody can point to. And inside organizations you'll have these legendary stories of people who were best in class. Right, it could be negotiating a close. It could be, you know, negotiating a close. It could be, you know saving. You know pulling in the right people from either side, from the seller side or the customer side to make a close, or a really unique way to do prospecting. There's a lot of different things that can be done there, but, yeah, there's always room for improvement. But I love that. I love that framework you thought about right, which is like it's important.
Speaker 1:So see what he just did. Is he looked at it from the competency level to say best in class? He didn't say this is the person that closed $3 million, because oftentimes the person that closes the most revenue maybe you got best territory, maybe they got the most sales engineering hours, and once you start normalizing for things like I know this one dude, one time he had six times the sales engineering hours of anybody else in the company, guess who sold the most. Well, it would have been really hard not to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know what that's? A great example that I always talk to like shared service teams about is, like you know, you hire salespeople to ask for things, right. So if you're a recruiter and you feel like your salespeople are asking you for a lot of things, that's a good thing, right? You want, your, your sales organization is trained to ask for things, so they're going to ask externally to customers. They're also going to ask things internally to to shared services that they think can help them.
Speaker 2:Now sometimes there's a little overreach and there's a little bit of the squeaky wheel gets the most oil. But quite often when salespeople are asking for things, they're doing it for a reason, and I think that's where HR can really understand is like hey, help me understand why you're asking for this right, whether it's a faster recruiting process or a different way of screening candidates or this type of training, or we're asking for your thoughts on a reorganization of the sales organization or something like that right. But that's one thing I think that salespeople can always have a little self-awareness on to say look, I know I'm asking for a lot, but that's why you hired me. Right, you hired me to ask the things and I'm doing it internally as well.
Speaker 1:Exactly yeah, and that if they don't ask for it, they're not going to ask for next step. They're not going to ask for the introduction to the senior person, right Get? The order can get placed before the end of the quarter, whatever it is, and then you just end up with this compliant army of mid performers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's interesting, I think. You know. Other thing that is kind of I did this once with a, with a recruiter is I just had them spend time watching sales do their job Right. And one you know I worked for a large beverage company early in my career and you know somebody from recruiting would come in, come into the market and just you know we were in and out of grocery stores all day and they're just like, okay, got it. I understand what the job is now, I understand what we're looking for.
Speaker 2:And then you kind of break down some barriers and you get aligned on what the cultural things are needed. You get aligned on where the integration needs to happen between the two teams, but you kind of invite people into your world. It's like the example of your example of the guy pulling in the engineering right. Maybe a little overused skill at that standpoint, but there's also value in that Right. Bring me, bring people into your world, let me know what you're, what you're, what you're dealing with and see how they can help you and also be the perspective Right. You know it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I've heard recruiters say I would never walk into the CFO's office and tell them how to do their job. But people tell me how to recruit all day long and there's tips and tricks and things to consider from a recruiting standpoint that you need to really listen to the recruiters and they can be a voice of reason for you. But it's all about your mindset as a sales leader. What do you want out of your HR and recruiting partners? Do you really want them to be a strategic partner? You should right, but they also have to prove to you on their side that they have the ability, the desire and the capabilities to be that strategic partner that can help you build a great team and who should facilitate this relationship.
Speaker 1:Who should be the executive sponsor that owns alignment between HR and sales?
Speaker 2:That's a great, great question. I think it's a good question from the CEO down into both of them. But I do think if sales are responsible for the output of their team and a chief sales officer is responsible for developing a great organization, they need to understand specifically what they need to be able to do that. So I think it should really ultimately start with sales. But I think it's a great kind of view from the top discussion of trying to understand hey, where are these relationships? Kind of down at the ad hoc, I'm going to call you when I need something level versus hey, what are you doing from a strategic standpoint? Same way, you would think about calling your finance department and saying, hey, what's your advice here on how to actually structure this deal? Or, hey, what are our capabilities and constraints here with this customer who wants to move on a? You know, we might lose a customer from a pricing standpoint.
Speaker 1:Right, because there's two things there's the advisory piece and then there's the do a bunch of work piece. And I think the advisory piece is pretty straightforward because you can get the two people that lead each group to have a 20-minute conversation and probably get to where they need to get to in terms of do a bunch of work, prioritization, challenges between other roles and then skill set challenges. Frankly, because if you've got a sales team and you need to be able to diagnose and prioritize what their developmental opportunities are, that might be out of the skill set and experience of someone, what their developmental opportunities are that might be out of the skill set and experience of someone. And if they start using Chad GPT baby, that thing's trading on HubSpot blogs which were written by 23-year-old marketing graduates. If you've ever read that book Disrupted, what's that? Have you read that book Disrupted? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So this dude I forget his name he went and worked at HubSpot and he was a Newsweek reporter. He's in his early fifties, I think, and he said I'm going to go work in tech. So he goes and works in tech. He's also a writer on the TV show Silicon Valley, so that shows that he's very funny. The book made me laugh out loud. I rarely laugh out loud when I read a book, but this thing just had me cracking up. So he's sitting there and he's describing the content marketing team at HubSpot and it's wild, he said it was. Basically he was describing it as a sorority house and they write these articles and that's what ChatGPT is trained on, because that's where so much of the sales content is on the internet. So just be very careful when you're using those AI tools to try to summarize how things are, because that's where they got all their info from.
Speaker 2:Sure Is that a disrupted my misadventure in the startup bubble. Yeah it's hilarious.
Speaker 2:All right, it's a good read. I'll have to check it out. You know, one interesting thing on this is you have that head of HR and you have that head of sales. They could do a joint venture project where they deputize a couple of leaders on each of their respective teams and say, hey, I'm going to take a couple of people from my sales organization, we'll take a couple of people from HR, and I want you to reimagine and reinvigorate our recruiting process.
Speaker 2:And the two of you are going to come back and report to us on what that looks like and feels like.
Speaker 2:So each side has a voice, right, each side has output that they are required to present back upstream, and then you get everybody on the same page about how we're actually going to go and execute that.
Speaker 2:And then that you should have some of the healthy debate and what I like to call the engine room of the company, the people that are actually doing the work, and they have a voice and they have a say, and it's not just, you know, one side telling the other side what they need to do better and then coming out of that, you know, it's kind of like taking a project to the, to your, to your professor in college, right, like, hey, here, what do you, what do you think, and then both sides can kind of, you know, from a leadership standpoint, can provide, you know, their, their thoughts and feedback, and then hopefully get to a place where you have a, you know, repeatable process and then inside of that, there should be some hey, here's some things we're trying to test and learn, you know, kind of kind of moving forward. So there's just, I think it's just you need to kind of poke this thing from a lot of different levels. You know executive room, engine room, and then also you know kind of frontline sellers.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think what you just described is great and it's an opportunity to test folks for future leadership potential.
Speaker 1:Yes, because if they can do that and do their day job and do it well and have all the different what you just described just come into mind. You have to have executive presence. You have to have analytical skills. You have to have writing skills. You have to be able to take feedback. You have to have executive presence. You have to have analytical skills. You have to have writing skills. You have to be able to take feedback. You have to have teamwork.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of good characteristics that can be surfaced by doing that project 100%, and what you're doing is you're empowering your people to drive change in the organization that's ultimately going to impact them and their team right. So if you're frustrated with the recruiting process or you're frustrated with how sales is handling the recruiting process? Great, we're going to give you an opportunity and a forum to fix it and make changes moving forward, and then you're going to own it and execute against it and see how that actually kind of works and plays out.
Speaker 1:Yep, a lot of times people do things like that projects put processes in place and then someone new comes in. And one thing I've noticed a lot. I was doing this judging competition. I was judging this competition for a sales enablement award and I was reading all these applications. I probably read 30 of them and the common theme was I built it from scratch. And I'm looking at the website of these companies. I say this is a thousand person company. You didn't build any. Wait a second, you did build something from scratch. And the skillset deficit deficiency one of those two words is that people struggle to take something that's not great and make it great as opposed to well, it sucks. I'm just going to start over from scratch. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:gosh, it's a great question, um. I I think you can kind of approach it from both right. So there's two ways to think about it. Either you blow up the process and you start complete from scratch, or diagnose current processes, what's working and what's not working, and build build some strength. Um, mapping out candidate experience from first touch to actually when they are, you know, up and running and fully trained and working, asking them to look back on their experience and and figure out where things could have been crisper and sharper is, is really, really important. Um, that's why you know. Surveys, even at the end of a recruiting process, whether it's a go, no go or end of a onboarding process, what worked, what didn't work, I think can be very helpful. But there is this reluctance to kind of blow things up from scratch. But, generally speaking, there are some things and processes that tend to work. Okay, you just want to make sure you don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Speaker 1:Well, because the first 20% of anything is the easiest thing in the world to build. You can go build, you give somebody that has any level of competence and you say, hey, go build this from scratch. First 20%, it's not hard. They're going to be able to show something that's pretty good and then, woohoo, and then they get to 60, 70% and things start getting hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when you look at a process, you look at where are things taking too long and where were we getting suboptimized output right? And those are probably in the recruiting process. You talk about frustration. It's either this is taking too long from the candidate side, from the hiring manager side, why is this taking too long? Right, when you actually look at the work involved in actually hiring someone, it's probably a day's work, it's not that a lot of time.
Speaker 2:You read the resume, you run them through, a bunch of interviews, maybe a couple of background checks, boom. But those eight weeks can get extrapolated over eight hours. 10 hours can extrapolate over eight or 10 weeks. And you do lose candidates From there. You lose sales. And then, if you're getting sub-optimized hires or hires that aren't working out, well, that's a great engineering process. Are you not hiring the right people? Are you not training them? But I do think that find the spots of success in organizations and then reverse engineer it, and hiring is one of them. Where did we get it? Who did we get it right with? How did we get it right with them? Why did we get it right with?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why did we get it right with them? Not just because they came in and they were great. Well, why are they great? Yeah. What are the attributes of that person?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what are the attributes? Their background, their skillset, when did they hit a low point or did they face a challenge inside the organization? And then how did they work through it individually with their manager, or did you need the manager, need help, you know, and kind of getting somebody back on track?
Speaker 1:Well, because people have trajectories that they're on. Some are positively sloped, some are flat, some are negatively sloped. I guess not that many are negative. It's kind of hard to be negative. You can be very low, but I know nobody can see my hands right now. But imagine that you've got. You've got somebody that's getting worse over time. I don't know that that's maybe at a very low rate, but you never have anybody that's getting worse at a at a fast rate, unless we're talking about some kind of professional sports that requires high levels of oxygen consumption. I know there's a joke to be made here somewhere. Let's see. Who do we have Too far back? But Ryan Leaf, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Gosh, yeah, by the way. Amazing turnaround story on him, by the way. If you've ever read up on oh, is he doing well now. Good for him. Oh, he's doing amazing.
Speaker 2:well, oh yeah, another. But an example, a great example of resilience and self-awareness too incredibly self-aware. But no, I think, I think you know sales teams. I mean, I was told earlier in my career your team is either getting better or they're getting worse every day, right, and you know. You know where are things good and getting better, where are things bad and getting worse. Cause things can be bad and they're getting better and that's okay and that's actually a great quadrant to run your people through, right? Hey, tell me what's working well and what's not working well and where are you getting better and where are you getting worse. And put those in a four. You know a quadrant of four things and you understand. All right, let's understand what's not good and getting worse and figure that out, all right.
Speaker 2:And that kind of directs you to where your biggest challenges are going to be. But yeah, you're going to have, you know, managing people. You know humans are the most complex creatures ever and they will never cease to surprise you, in good or bad ways. And if you talk to anybody in HR, that's one of the more fascinating things. They're like humans.
Speaker 1:We just can't predict what they're always going to want to do and need to do. Oh yeah, I was talking to an investor one time that works in a fund and they were telling me. They said I don't understand, the salespeople don't do what we told them to do. I said yeah, welcome to sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, yeah, it wouldn't be so easy if everybody just did exactly what you told them to do. You know, at at at any time, so, um, but now it's um, and I think you know. Just going back to HR, I think the um, um, I think one of the interesting things is like I've seen this happen once where they took somebody from sales and made them a recruiter for a year, right, and you cause look, if you're a recruiter, you, you are sourcing, you are selling, you are prospecting, you are negotiating, right, you are yeah, yeah, you're, it's sales, right and your best. And that's why your high powered recruiting firms are actually salespeople at heart oh, the firms are great.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, the firms versus the internal is where it gets interesting, because there are some just ridiculously great firms out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then, well, the real magic is when you can get that firm mentality and talent inside an organization to do self-sourcing, you can really unlock and move faster, cheaper and more impactful in a lot of ways, but I think a lot of it is just, you know, sales realizing hey, hr is a resource. And it's up to you to think about how do hey, hr is a is a resource, and how, and it's up to you to think about how do you make them as strong of a resource as possible? Um, and not have them just be um, you know, you know the the the performance police, right, or the. You know, you know the the the extension of the legal department.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's not fun, that's not fun I always say you know, when it comes to expense reports, just don't use your company card anywhere that has a cover charge and you'll probably be okay. Exactly, and don't buy things by the bottle.
Speaker 2:Buy things by the glass and don't pay cover charge and you're probably good. The one last thing I'll leave you with is just there's a lot of value in hiring managers doing some of their own sourcing on LinkedIn, for example, right. So if you're a high performing salesperson and you get an email from a recruiter, it's just a recruiter.
Speaker 2:But if you get an email from the person you might be working for or the person that runs a sales organization. Good gosh, you're going to, you're, you're, you're high, much higher, like higher likelihood to do that. So this is where, like, a recruiter can kind of have that partnership mindset. It's like, hey, I need you to help me with some sourcing. I'm going to make it easy for you. It's going to be an hour of your time. I'm going to, I'm going to go and find the candidates for you, but I need you to. You know, kind of you know it goes back to the recruiting. If you're, if you're, a prime college football recruit, how do you think about just leveraging, you know, your power?
Speaker 1:and prestige in an organization to help your recruiter be a better recruiter. I love it. That's great advice. Cool Brian. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I know we got a hop. How can people reach out to you?
Speaker 2:People can find me. You can find me on LinkedIn, brian Sudant S-O-U-D-A-N-T, and you can also find my. I have a LLC, sudantconsultinggroupcom as well, and I help organizations improve their go-to-market strategies and capabilities, ranging from sourcing, training, onboarding, cross-functional collaboration If you think about the end-to-end sales process. I can help an organization improve all of them.
Speaker 1:So yeah, again, last name's Sudant S-O-U-D-A-N-T first name, brian, but thanks for having me, corey. This has been amazing. Well, thanks, brian, it's been great. And thanks everybody for tuning in to another episode of the Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time.