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hello everyone and welcome to the next edition of the sales webinar series that we have here at the center for professional selling at ball state university i'm your host devarangarajan and today in continuation with my talk with people across the pond uh i also have sebastian mr sebastian dahl who is a freelance hr consultant uh but who has lots of years of experience in senior hr human resource positions helping the sales organizations in these organizations go through tough times so sebastian thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and the audience thank you so much steven great talking to you again and i'm really looking forward to our conversation it's a question i must say that you're the first hr person that i am talking to for my webinar series essentially what i'm trying to say that it's not that when i've done my training sessions we've not dealt with hr and learning and development and that kind of stuff but you're the first person that i'm talking to in hr and i've been doing this for two years and i think it just goes to show that there are so many different departments in an organization that plays such a critical role for sales to be successful that i'm kicking myself for not actually having talked to a senior hr professional from that viewpoint so i'm going to remedy that situation so i'm going to talk to you about this so so uh sebastian just from your perspective what is happening in the business world out there that an hr professional says wait a minute it's time for us to be looking at changing the way we do business with our sales organization that is what is the need for sales transformation as you put it from an hr perspective yeah yeah i think it's a really interesting question and when you when you contemplate what has changed significantly in sales over the last say 10 15 years i think we've seen some significant shifts in in the circumstances under which sales operate so from a macro perspective obviously we've seen the consolidation i think a lot of conservation across many industries we've seen the globalization also kicking in making it much more transparent and markets that were traditionally quite isolated or even industries or customer segments that were quite isolated have become much more transparent and so it's become significantly easier for potential customers and existing customers to go out and hunt for whatever knowledge and benchmarks and data that they need which has i think significantly also changed the role of sales towards customers and and and and markets um and and simultaneously um i think many industries whether it's b2c b2g b2c b2b um also see much larger demands from customers the customer demands have increased significantly and our customers want more and they want more from less to some extent uh also um and and the the the last thing i want to mention is also um when you look at professional sourcing and procurement teams um they've gone through a radical change and have become much more sophisticated their approach towards potential suppliers and and how they push and drive the market also so i think that's some of the key reasons uh for the sales transformation uh challenge that i think we see in in many industries in many businesses sebastian that's it's very interesting i want to pick on two things one is it's interesting that when i talk to sales leaders they talk about some of the things that you mentioned my point is that where does why does a hr professional like you get interested in what problems the sales organization is facing i know that this is a loaded question because it's amazing that i'm talking to an hr professional and you're talking the lingo of sales leaders you're talking about what salesmen should be talking so tell me is there also a move from hr to also start saying you know what we are no longer just going to be a generalist function that we are actually even going to have our the equivalent of your boots on the ground or together the sales organization to what extent do you see that happening more and more or is that a must moving forward well firstly i think it is about moving forward but i also think that within hr communities it's something that we've been talking about for for quite some years that we want to become [Music] true business partners and i think this is the truth for many support functions that you want to become truly value add or value adding in your approach to how you support especially the whether it's sales or operations and and in order to do that you need to grasp the um the value attributes that a particular business brings to the market and bring to the customer and and my belief and i think the belief of many hr professionals out there is that um sales is the most important function in any business right there i think we've for years we've i think almost neglected to think about sales as a truly strategic function and and sales has been sort of a a bit of an appendix on a a growing marketing organization and we need to we need to rethink that we need to rethink the way that we perceive sales in particular and i think sales and commercial functions overall have become much more of a science that they were uh just just five or ten years ago i love this i love the fact that we actually have senior hr professionals actually taking an interest in sales because that has always been the issue we've talked about it from because we've been teaching sales to younger students and there's this feeling that sales is not something for uh people who are well qualified and educated but i guess with the amount of interest saying that you even have hr business partners looking into sales just goes to show that there can be a good career path for those people interested in the career in sales or the fact that even internally you might want to move across departments i think it's fantastic that you have this i want to pick your brain on one more thing which i think is great that you mention it right because i think that's where the the hr function has a very bro kind of a view on how they can help the whole organization because every function within an organization needs to staff its people correct and which means that they have to work with hr so in a kind of field i i it is very strange that talking to you has only made me realize because it's one of those things where you think in your sidors but what talking to you and hearing you say but especially when you talk about procurement which i thought was brilliant is when i talk to a lot of sales managers they don't necessarily think about procurement probably because in their head okay we have to deal with them but when you say specifically as one of the micro mega trends is that the procurement organization is becoming more professional to what extent does hr also play a role in the professionalization of the procurement function because what you're actually doing is that you are not only looking at sales within your organization you're also helping the procurement organization professor so which means that you actually have a better bird's eye view of cutting-edge practices about how procurement so tell me your thoughts on that one so how do you guys in hr business partner share ideas so that what you learn from staffing procurement can be used to train or prepare the hr the sales people to understand what's happening there am i making sense in my question um well let me have a stab at it at least yeah yeah i think it's a really interesting um really interesting perspective and i am and i think what what a procurement the way that you in a business manage your procurement uh and manage your professional sourcing across categories indirect direct etc um is to some extent a bit of a mirror that you need to hold up in front of you and say well if these are the questions and the demands that we put on our suppliers then chances are that this is exactly the same reality that our sales organizations are facing and i think the um with the risk of of uh shooting a little bit in in an opposite direction here i think um what what we have in sales been really really good at for many many years and particularly in well again across many different sales branches and sales channels has been building customer relations we've been extremely good at building relationships to our customers in particular the few key people that are in a buying center and well as you've i think also mentioned in some of your interviews the size of the buying centers are growing significantly right on average there is now six point eight or so people you know in a buying center and and i think we within a sales organization and a business overall need to become or need to go away from being solely focused on building customer relations and becoming much more strategic in the way that we build not only relations with a customer across organizational levels across many styles but we also need to be much more scientific in the way we approach sales using data and being better at talking about the value-add that we bring to a customer instead of talking about the traditional parameters price quality delivery service etc i think this is a brilliant nature because i think what i really really what i'm taking away from this is the fact that procurement does not work with assumptions anymore right procurement works with better preparation more scientific and essentially the takeaway from this is from an hr perspective if you are touching both departments you can actually take a look at how procurement is becoming more professional and as you said it's like a mirror so why don't we get ourselves people to do the same things that our procurement is doing it to your suppliers therefore but for me tell me why is it that every time i talk to a company i say when you want to do practice role plays to coach your sales people get your own procurement team and practice with them and why is it that it does not happen why is it that an outsider like me can make such an obvious statement and an organization with professionals who are very very smart cannot make that connection of saying wait a minute our procurement is dealing with complex buying situations our sales people are dealing with it except that why don't we get our sales people to practice yeah without so essentially why does that not happen well i don't think there's a straightforward simple answer but but i think that the the harsh reality i think especially across many types of bigger businesses is that our ability to utilize the resources and the capabilities that we have within in building strong networks that help each other out in silos is i think something that we still struggle with even though that we have now much better tools and i think also appreciation um about the fact that we need to work together in order for us to succeed as a business um but i think you're absolutely right i think that there is um i think maybe it's a bit of a mindset that also we need to understand across functions that um we're all sales people you know whether we're we're facing the customer directly or indirectly we are all here to serve the customers right there's a there's a famous uh henry ford quote uh that says that uh um uh company owners they uh they don't they don't pay wages the customers payments the company owners only manage the money and manage the payslips and for me this is very very very heartening i'm not i think sebastian from my experience that you you are one of those cutting edge hr professionals who take the and speak the language of sales because if we expect our sales people to talk the language of their customers you are talking the language of your internal customers which i think is fantastic in terms of how you're talking they're saying things like 6.8 even following or at least looking at some of the blogs where we have talked to sales people from an hr perspective i think it's phenomenal that you want to be on the cutting edge of what is happening in terms of sales let me begin uh let me ask the next question so you talked about there's a need for transformation right how has the digital aspect so you talked about trends in uh in fact that your customers are more prepared uh there's going to be more consolidation and procurement is becoming more and of course one of the key things that is making a lot of this possible is technology right so technology that is driving forth how procurement is becoming more professional how customers are uh becoming more knowledgeable and how is technology shaping the sales function consequently in from an hr perspective well i think obviously uh in this unprecedented time that we currently find out the digitalization and iit has become something much more than just a random appendix it's become absolutely vital i think across many industries um in their attempt to cater to the needs of the market and and reassess the reality and i think first and foremost the sales organizations have been going through a sales function has been going through some significant shifts in terms of the tools and the analytics that they apply in in their everyday work and i think the the ip skills of any sales person whether your sales executive or your sales rep is much more demanding or the demands are much higher compared to what they traditionally were and i think when we when we look into the crystal ball in terms of some of the capabilities that we need going forward we need people that are much stronger at manipulating data working with data working with with analytics and but we also need people that have a curiosity and a much more holistic view on on their customers and and and the desire to truly understand their full supply cycle and how you from a sales perspective can help drive this now the tools the i.t tools are digital to new digital tools give you some of those opportunities but i think like in many other functions i sometimes tools and new it tools and new new digital uh ways of working can also become a bit of a hindrance yeah um so you need to be very straight on what is the purpose of whatever tool you want to implement um whether it's a new iot tool or segmentation tool new account plans new performance metrics what is the purpose of what it is you do and and how does this benefit uh well at the very end how does this benefit the customer but also how does this help sales become better so i think we are facing a completely uh revised way of thinking about capabilities and sales and what we need for the future andy um and and you had a really interesting interview some time ago with the cso insights yeah i believe uh celeste lunsford was his name and and and one of the one of the discussions or one of the topics you talked about was this sales talent survey in it that cso insights had done recently which was i think very very interesting and one of the things that came out of that conversation was that 84 i believe it was of sales executives don't think that they have the capabilities needed to cater to the needs of the customers in the future yeah right now that is staggering yes indeed it's it's for me that's you're absolutely right and i think for me this is great to hear from your perspective some of the things that we talk about and it's it's very heartening to see that sales managers are not alone in this right because at the end of the day is that the tendencies the sales managers already have so much demands placed on them that they cannot sometimes go back and take a look at how do i then translate this into workplace uh practices uh and and development uh skill sets needed and they need a partner inside and having hr being so driven from the perspective of sales management not just a general hr i think i think it's phenomenal that you talk about this now i just want to touch on the technology and you talked about these kind of things not having the skill set right so if 84 if you have 84 of sales leaders think that they don't have access to the right talent and pipeline my question of course is two things how ready are the sales executives themselves for the challenges of the future because it's easy to say that i don't have access to the talent but the question is do they have the skill set themself to recognize that they have to change themselves that's one question that i have and link to that is a question that is key to every organization that is looking at going through this kind of change what happens to fear anxiety that starts coming into again even executives are also prone to this so essentially if you can help me answer those two questions first is how in your opinion and you can be honest so this is not a reflection on where you worked with before but what you hear from your cohort of fellow hr professionals that 84 percent number to what extent can we safely say that the same 84 percent of managers who said that they don't have access to the right kind of talent are ready themselves yeah for these changes i think you judge upon something vital yeah and i think like i mean this doesn't just go for sales right okay you will see that there is a uh somewhat uh at times hazy feeling that we don't have what we need because either not moving quickly enough we're not efficient enough or we're not proactive enough and and certainly in my experience um what what starts that journey is truly the realization that we need to do something different yeah and and that is to to help build the bridge between whatever business strategy you have and how does that impact directly your commercial strategy and and all the many enablers that you have it has to be a personal strategy i've in my own experience i certainly had loads of uh good and challenging discussions with sales executives on on many different levels in the organization and and i think what where we need to help each other out across functions is to uh realize that we don't all necessarily have the answers right away and that we need to we need to lean into this exercise and we need to be bold in explaining and exploring the the unknown and but simultaneously also make sure that there are consequences so at some point in time any sales leader will need to take ownership of a transformation journey the first part of that journey is to clearly being able to articulate what is that we wish to achieve what is the point of what we're doing how does this benefit our customers how does this benefit our bottom line how does it change the way that we think and act in our everyday work and if a sales executive um does not strongly believe and become the role model in taking lead on this journey and then there's only so much you can do from a support function point of view yeah so i think there's there's lots of uncertainty and the best way to at times deal with uncertainty is to lean into it and accept the fact that you don't have all the answers and i think at times as leaders we we can be a bit afraid of actually in involving and engaging our own organizations and helping us understand how we can help each other out in addressing some of those typical transformation or change management challenges that we face so let that answer help me with this semester so to what extent do you actually see that because of this transformation there's a lot of anxiety buildup amongst i'm going to only stick to sales professionals and sales executives right so have you observed that happen that people suddenly feel and the commit is not helping either right so essentially uh things are already changing um kubit has made it faster so what extent do you feel that anxiety and consequently well-being being affected amongst the sales professionals and what does hr do to help with this yeah well i think it to your point i think there is a huge it has a huge impact and i think there is lots of uncertainty yeah and there is lots of fear to some extent about what does the future hold and do i still have a job tomorrow and and what are these new requirements you know how do i now operate in this new world in which i'm not i'm not able to sit down across my customer which i've done for the past 15 years and all of a sudden i have to do online meetings and so there is i think to your point lots of anxiety in the sales organization and um i don't think that there is any simple solution right i think that in order to deal with anxiety um you need again to to be able to articulate what what is it that we are that we want to do what can we as an organization put in place to help our sales people develop and and and also be able to to yeah give them the tools and the knowledge needed uh to act in this new world and now sometimes people will embrace this and and hope i believe strongly that you know most in most of those cases most of the time people will lean into this and they will learn and they will develop but there are also those instances where you need to force a bit of attrition in your in your sales yeah um and um i think as a as a as a company as a business you owe it to your to your customers to ensure that you have the right capabilities at any point in time yeah and so as part of this change journey i think we also need to just be real about the fact that people will either voluntary or involuntary leave our business and there will be some regretted leavers along the way but there will also be times where it's perfectly okay to say goodbye to people who either don't have the capability nor the mindset needed to push forward indeed so one of the things i actually wanted to clarify with you that attrition does not necessarily always mean that they have to leave the organization they might have to leave the function but maybe they're perfectly they're great team players they can bring to uh kind of a different function within the organization the knowledge for example they could move into procurement for example to try and see what they want to do if they've been good at it so yeah i think it's very interesting you talk about this so that actually is a perfect segue into my next set of questions which has got to do with how is hr facilitating sales transformations happening in companies so if you can give us some examples of from your own experience or from what you've observed so tell us through some of the things that you've actually helped uh as hr professional helping your sales colleagues yeah happy too yeah i think um we spoke about building the bridge between a business strategy and your commercial what is it that you need to put in place in order to be able to deliver on your aspirations as a company and and um there are many different factors that play into this um some of them is around very straightforward do we have do we have first and foremost do we have the right structure yeah in order for us to to be able to deliver like you said yourself you may have voluntary leaders or involuntary leaders that could actually do very well in another sales funnel and i think sales overall has become as we talked about much more complicated and you have you see much more specialist roles now compared to what you did previously so i think there's a there's a piece of arm structure and where we as a professional hr organization would need to play a vital part in helping both understand what is it that we aspire to do but also what is structure that we need to put in place yeah then i think there is some very basic stuff um around roles and responsibilities yeah so being quite clear about what is it what are the different roles that we have within our business how is it that they need to collaborate what are the responsibilities and the capabilities needed in order for people to be a success in whatever roles we define and obviously this needs to be there needs to be some agility and flexibility in this things change quite quickly especially in sales i think sales is probably the most or the single one function that has the highest amount of change happening you know absolutely different custom demands new competitors coming into the market new sales channels different ways of thinking different ways of working and then there is um something very again quite basic around the way we work so what are the processes what are the sales processes that we have so how do you define a price yeah what how do you how do you build an account plan how do you follow up what are the metrics that you as a sales manager or sales rep um that you use in your day-to-day life in order for you to ensure that you are moving in the right direction and there are incentive plans so how do you incentivize your sales organization and how do you develop your sales organization i think something like sales coaching is a truly fundamental thing but i think the real the harsh reality is that in many businesses whether they're big global businesses or small mid-sized businesses i think sales coaching and actually developing sales reps uh or sales managers um is something where we keep struggling what about uh a couple of things here as well one of the things we hear a lot is this idea for you said it earlier we talked about about warfare talent right so to what extent does hr play a vital role in talent well bringing in talent and talent retention is that something that you see has seen a drastic improvement in how hr works together with sales where in the past you would have hr bring in a set of candidates then sales managers would take forever to make a decision and then suddenly the candidates have gone so essentially have you seen improvements in the way that hr works much more closely with sales managers in deciding what kind of people you want to recruit what are your sources or you know what i mean where are your pipelines coming in from especially from a talent pipeline so tell us tell me a little bit more about that as well yeah so i think that there is again there is with the risk of repeating myself there is no uh there is no uh right answer i think you will find companies out there that are extremely proficient and extremely professional and strategic about building strong talent pipelines in sales and other functions yeah i think the reality is though that you have in many companies recruitment is something of a bit of a transactional process still yeah and it's very much based on gut feel yeah you know do you did you find someone that you like you talk about the cultural fit um you don't talk necessarily very much about diversity you don't necessarily talk very much about um the kind of skills that you may need in a new role right you have you have a tendency to copy paste whatever the previous guy or girl did and so i think there is a big challenge for us still um from both from an hr perspective but certainly also from a sales perspective to be much more strategic in how we think about talent acquisition and and i think there are lots of great tools out there right you have lots of fantastic testing tools different assessment centers that you can use um in in both assessing and bringing on board as people sales people on all levels i think to some extent the harsh reality is also that in many companies still these tools have a tendency to either just keep sitting in the draw or you you use them but it's more by exception rather than by war i think there is a in as in many other um functions there is a bit of a challenge on the discipline and our discipline opposed to being strategic and and thoughtful in how we both hire people identify potential talent out there higher people on board people yeah onboarding is yes yes i think many many businesses where we still struggle um with with putting in place strong onboarding programs we have a tendency i think whether it's sales or or even an hr and to say well we do a bit of an on-boarding program and sometimes the duration of that onboarding program is a month or two month and we we feed you with information about products and the way that you talk to customers and this is by the way this is what your customer pipeline needs to look like these are the metrics now go sell um and and and we need to be much more mindful of what are the steps we need to go through in our onboarding process and typically we have pretty good data telling us where do we have challenges along the way when when do people either when do you see a drop in their performance when do they typically leave the business when do they typically become frustrated typically we know these things and and i think we need to be more mindful when we build for instance onboarding programs let me ask you about something that i recently heard and it's again as i said just like you talked about how procurement can teach a lot of things to sales i mean procurement in your organization teaching sales tell me about this thing that i've heard a lot i don't know if you've heard about it at least in the academic space there's this talk about job crafting have you heard the term job crafting being used by practitioners by by professionals like you the idea is that you need to craft a job so i've heard of job design yes so i was just curious to see if you've heard of this again as i said i'm sorry for putting you on the spot but i just thought since you're so knowledgeable that you're hearing you're saying all the things that we hear but apparently the the topic right now is job crafting and how do you craft a job which for me sounds a lot more in touch with the agility that you need in an organization and so i was just curious to see or what is the when it comes to job design or redesign what is the buzzword that hr professionals use to try and take a look at what kind of people and what kind of jobs they should be doing so roles are typical words that we use but like job design i've heard about it but have you heard of what is the buzzword if any that you use right now to help recognize what kind of people you want yeah i think it's a really good question first and foremost i think and i i i honestly have very little experience with drop crafting it's really something that that uh that you as you say it's been a bit of a bus and i think the one where we typically struggle that if i if i can put that perspective on it is that um in order for job crafting to truly be impactful and you need as an organization to be willing to take the risk of saying we don't necessarily have something that is very clear cut in terms of what are what are the responsibilities or what are the apis that we will apply what are the what are the key the key metrics that we will be looking for but you need to lean into this and and to a much larger degree accept the fact that you don't know the answer but believe in that if we bring somebody on board he or she um will for sure find those levers that are important to pull in order to add value and and i think it's very much almost a trust exercise more than anything else but my experience on this point is is very very limited hey but it's fun but for me the fact is that i'm only hearing in fact i'm going to based on what you said i'm going to go ahead and by the way for the audience this is the first time you're hearing it so if anybody uses it you heard it here first i think you should be thinking even of job crafting alone is not enough i think you should be thinking because you should be looking at career crafting so from the viewpoint of saying when a person of course you talk about career paths but the career path again assumes based on the past what has happened and how it will work moving forward but career crafting is where you give the people the opportunity this is my opinion i do not first of all i should go look at what job crafting is myself but if i were to build on what you said you talk about levers and stuff like that i think you should even think about career crafting if you want to keep people excited in their jobs once they come in so i should have a good job that should be kind of give people the challenge but you should also talk about how that job alone is not going to define them how they can actually see a career within your organization yeah and i'm i would be really curious at some point in time to see are if we go with job crafting it's not that you just do it at one level you have to do it at all levels within the organization because what's going to happen is that you do not want to have a job crafting for sales people but your sales managers do not know how to deal and coach the kind of people that you have so i think it's it's gonna be job crafting is not something that you just stood at one level it has to be something that has to be thought out in terms of what it means at different levels and of course if people cross that's where the carrier crafting comes in so that's you heard it first here for the audience so anyway so i have one last question for you sebastian this is in the interesting time more than anything else so if we talked about this and this last question might be a long answer from you as well is what are some of the common challenges that you face from an hr perspective because i've always looked at how sales managers have looked at hr saying oh my god here they come again with all the policies and all the kind of things uh they are the ones with all the bureaucratic stuff and we need to do it but of course some people say okay i'm glad there's somebody doing the bureaucratic stuff but the complaints are much more than the positive so tell me about some of the challenges that you face from an hr perspective even as you help sales organizations transform themselves yeah well um firstly i think that that is the the this well it's not a simple thing but business acumen is something that i think we struggle with continuously in in both the hr space but also across support functions so yeah so trying to understand and grasp what is it actually that we do and when we talk about again simple things such as setting up price for instance uh or measuring our gross margins um or building customer pipelines what is it that we do so there needs to be i think one of the challenges we face as an hr profession is is still understanding the nitty gritty parts of how our business operate and where we then can add value so that that's that's i think one challenge i think the second challenge is um just being allowed to partake in sales transformation processes yeah and at times you know you have to uh push down the door quite efficiently in order for you to be allowed to sit at the table and help drive these things and i think we um in this business overall we have to we have to think about how do we invite one another in into uh into the into the hardcore machine room uh because then then that is where we can start out adding some some significant value and then of course there is the the the traditional change management process is is how to uh be able to create excitement motivation um purpose uh of what it is that you're doing um and at times we as hr professionals have a tendency to uh maybe be a bit narrower minded also in terms of when building performance management processes for instance we have a tendency to be quite generic in our approach and i think to some extent uh hr professionals where we have one of our single biggest challenges is actually trying to be a little bit entrepreneurial in the way we think about hr and hr processes because well the best vast or the harsh reality is probably that most businesses have a talent process or specific performance management management systems in place or specific comp and policies etc um but at times we do become quite generic in our approach on building the needed tools and processes for sales for instance so we we need to allow ourselves to be a little bit uh to think out of the box at times and yeah embrace embrace uh the multiple uh different types of solutions that we could put in place all day semester thank you so much i think we can talk for hours on what i think is very very it's very very interesting so but in the interest of time i would like to thank you again for taking time uh to talk to me and the audience as well i think this is fascinating uh getting the perspective from an hr professional things that i should be doing much more in talking to other professions within within the other within the same organization and how they can actually contribute to sales and i think this is maybe a learning point for me as well as that just talking to sales managers and sales executives gives a very nice perspective but also uh talking across uh silos is going to also give us a different perspective so thank you so much for taking the time thank you very much it's been really interesting thank you thanks stop recording yes