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hi there i'm joe conrad author of four best-selling sales books over the years I've been asked hundreds of times what I think is most important for sales success and my answer has been consistent during all that time it's a deep understanding of who your buyers are what what's going on in their business right now the issues and challenges they're facing what their current situation is regarding your products and services who the buyers are specifically and what matters to each of the people involved in the decision process and when people understand that then they are in a position to best serve their customers so to me that's foundational and that's why I'm so excited that discover org is doing this series interviewing allowing me to interview some really smart people about their business and get inside their buyers head to find out what's really ticking today we are joined by somebody David Kingsley if we take a look at all the things that you're responsible you said facilities and HR functions together so how would you describe all the things that you're in charge of the scope of your responsibilities sure so I'll just sort of walk through my my organization so the facilities and workplace services so it's all the team who do the real estate strategy making sure that we have enough enough seats allocated for our people what is our space utilization then the workplace services folks who take care of making sure that all the catering is in hand means the facilities are kept up maintenance happens you know light bulbs or replace carpet squares are fixed when they're torn up or stained you know all those type of creature comforts that we all need in our job those all sit in the real estate and workplace services my facilities team here at mill soft and then on the HR side of the house it's everything from our compensation strategy how do we pay our people make be sure we're committed to fair and equal pay for all of our people it's our HR business partners who are working with individual client executives inside the organization to help them with their org design to make sense of their employee engagement survey data what are they doing inside their work to engage and inspire their people it's the team who does all the HR information technology so all of our data that we keep in work day here at meals off to make sure that we're keeping data secure and accurate to use inside the organization it's all of the HR operations so when an employee has a question or an issue they need to get some service they're asking a question about their 401k or their benefit how do we serve them there and then the last piece is orientation that we have one when people come into the company what about you I think the the big ones that I really get involved with are the relationships that we have with vendors and service providers and product provisioning that speaks to that employee experience that has talked about around reinforcing and building culture and driving trust in the organization and so I'll give you an example we use workday as our system of record I need to make sure that that technology has uptime that delivers value to not only my team but to the leaders we serve because we have managers who self serve in our workday system so I wanna make sure that there's no strong time that there's reliability and that our data is secure that's in the cloud and I need to trust that workday service provisioning you know is going to keep my people data secure some of which includes things like Social Security numbers individuals names of their children their spouses where they live their partners all that data is in there that's really really valuable both to employees and that I need as an employer to help serve them but I have to make sure that kept interesting so I look to vendors with whom I can kind of build partnership and rely on make sure that that service versioning is happening consistently and in a safe and secure manner interesting I just saw a stat the other day I can't remember the source of it but it was talking about Millennials who are now you know more than half of our workforce around the world and it was talking about that I think it was like 60 or 70 percent of Millennials are willing to take a 15% pay cut to work for a company whose values align with theirs and now my HR side of me says well how many them actually are taking the pay cut but more to it it speaks to the fact that values are rising in prominence as we see in the interview process as candidates are asking us questions they want to learn more about the company's values because you're spending 40 50 60 plus hours a week of your life working with and for this company you want to know that it's driving up as similar things in the world that you believe companies who are making manifest those and listening to their employees and driving value and positive change in their communities those are the ones who are going to be talent takers in the market the ones who ignore that they're going to unfortunately be talent losers in the market ok so we've talked about a lot of things one things I'd like to focus on now is technology how are you leveraging technology as head of global people in places sure I think that the technology is certainly a integral part of our experience every day just as as employees and the technology experience really reinforces that employee experience if I log on to my machine in the morning and I can't access my data or I can't get into my machine or I can't connect with the network or you know one of the service providers that we use is down that's immediately introducing friction into my employee experience and so being very mindful of what is the employee expectation a customer expectation of the employee experience from a technology perspective is really key so the first and most important thing that I'm doing when it comes to technology buys is understanding what is it that my my customers my internal customers the employees of the company what do they want how do they want to experience their technology in the day to day life and I want to take cues from that so if they if they're telling me and this varies by company and organization I can't say this is one size fits all if they say look I want everything on my mobile phone I want to be able to get this at my fingertips that's one key buying indicator from my customers internally okay I need to really focus on mobile or maybe they say you know what when I leave the office or the factory or is the location at the end of the day I don't want to be bothered with work at all I want all my desktop so put all the calories and energy into driving a great desktop or laptop experience others might say you know what I'm out in the field working with customers or clients or you know working an industry where I don't have access to a laptop or I can't have my phone with me all the time but I do have access to a telephone and I want to be service provision you know through phone service that's another type of technology and sometimes we we like to think that we're all you know so postmodern and we're all mobile double provision well there's many many industries and many employees out there who don't live on their mobile phones maybe they want to call a phone number and talk to a human or a vice the system that really works seamlessly to get service provisioning and so the first and most important thing for me is to listen to my customers to say what new employees want in the organization and then how am i working with vendors to provide and provision services that meet my customers at their point of need and alignment with their expectations so are you looking at expanding the kind of technology technology you have right now changing it what are you looking at right now to do differently in the upcoming year sure I think the ones that we're constantly looking at are a few the first I mentioned earlier is our HR information system we always want to make sure that we're using the latest technology that's delivering the most value into the organization so hrs is always an important one another one is the technologies we use to look at how our culture is doing as we put out surveys and ask questions of our employees and ask them to give us feedback in the organization that's another another one that we're looking at constantly saying okay how many years or months left on our contract do we like this technology is it still serving the purpose or are we ready to move on to a different a different technology for that so that's that's one of them another technology that we're constantly at is how employees are able to give and get feedback in the organization so as a leader gives feedback to his/her or their teams and then how does upward feedback work and how does peer feedback work and what are the platforms that are available to be able to do that they're really focused on their customers customers who are essentially the employees that I serve every day so focus on the end customer how's that going so that's the first and foremost important thing I think is having those vendor relationships that really speak to that um and ask for that input and feedback and are the vendors that I'm working with are they incorporating that feedback as they think about the next iteration or next version of their design for their UI and their UX and their data structure and their data strategy or they into account the customers customers feedback that's why the first and most important cue and so one of the questions for me is you know can i deploy this technology to my customers to employees without having to give them a 50-page user guide yes you're going to want to have a technology experience that's very consistent with their customer experience outside of our building when they're in their personal life they have these technology interactions if they come into the organization inside the company and I put technology in front of them that just befuddles them they got to scratch their head they're calling phone numbers are reading through manuals they're gonna say I don't want to use that I want this to be as intuitive as the other technology I use in my personal life and that's gonna drive my buying decision that's going to drive the change curve and it's gonna drive the value that technology delivers into the organization so because you're in the people business and your focus is so much on people do you have do you focus on the business case behind that I mean that's kind of soft and touchy-feely that what you're just saying is there a business case behind what you're talking about - and is that crucial - yes sure so let's let's let's make this real let's say I have an employee and I'm gonna do a quick public math here which is always a dangerous proposition but let's say they make 5060 thousand dollars a year and I break that down into an hourly rate let's say it's whatever twenty five thirty dollars an hour that I pay that person through there let's say I need them to do two hours of administrative work a week inside the organization whether it's logging their time checking their pay stub you know giving feedback what have you I've just spent $60 of the company's money that week on something that's internal that they're not building a product servicing a product selling a product working with customers if I can reduce that by half let's say I can take that $60 and make it into $30 I've just returned value back to the business back to the company and frankly back to the customers that product that time is new into the product that's gonna go into our customers service delivery and our CFO is gonna say thank you for reducing your cost to serve I was thinking about how I make buying decisions I think there are a number of vendors out there who believe and and I don't fault them for this but they do believe this that I'm gonna make a buying decision based upon a cold email they send me in the middle of a Tuesday with some catchy subject line they've tried to use from some basho email training they've gone to with some value proposition or even worse an assertion of a of an area of challenge in my business that I'm gonna click on and go absolutely sell me all that I'll give you all my budget I mean you don't respond to those kind of emails positive and when I don't I don't respond at all frankly I used to say you know I thank you for your email I was very kind and pleasant and then they just started growing and they started getting more and more and they send them to me on Tuesday and then I get another one on Friday from that same person it says hey you might have missed my email on Tuesday but I wanted to put this on the top of your inbox and I delete it again and they come back on Monday and they say hey maybe you missed it over the weekend but I wanted to tell you about this amazing opportunity to do X for Y cost with my Z business at that point Jill I right-click on the email and I send it to fishing I make it a phishing email because at that point I'm considering that to be a nuisance if I wanted to respond I would have that's just not the way that I personally buy I don't have any problem with direct mail marketing you know a lot of business have been built on this is not how I buy generally I buy when I'm in the frame of reference to make those buying decisions and that generally comes when I'm at a conference or an event or something that I've gone to saying they're going to be vendors there with whom I want to interact about a product or service that I'm evaluating whether I'm trying to replace something buy something new enhance it whatever and I'm going purpose on purpose to meet with those people and hear what they have to say and tell them about my challenge areas midway through a Tuesday when I'm just running the business is not the time that I'm doing that only through conferences once you get your mind set on I want to do something in this arena yeah what education process do you go through yeah I think I do think the emails that I get from folks who are trying to tell me about something that have something attached to it that is or a link to it even better that says we wrote a white paper on this you're some of our knowledge capital here some of our thinking here's some of the research that we did they were paying into the system to give you a point of view on something that you may be interested if I am and I click on it and if it's you know maybe a three to five minute read that I can scan and pick up a new nugget or two or a data piece or an insight or you know some type of perspective I didn't have before that then sticks in my head it's like I remember that vendor created that piece of knowledge capital that gave me a new lens on one of the challenges I'm facing mm-hmm then when I meet or see that person or that company at one of these events that I'm going to that brand equity has already established in my mind I'm thinking yeah I read your white paper on that it was really helpful I'd like to hear more about that so bringing value to me before asking for value from me in terms of my money or my commitment I think it's really important for vendors to put something out there first in terms of new things to think about to drive the industry forward versus just convincing me to just buy their thing putting time into the research are dissipating actively in the ecosystem that you're selling into I think is important so if you and I can't say this as someone who used to be in a sales driven role I carried a quota so I know what that feels like I'm not trying to say I don't understand that if I'm selling into the HR market sure that I have developed or in building HR bona fides of my own to know what keeps my buyer up at night really truly to understand that engage in a productive conversation in that whether it's a a synchronous or a synchronous conversation but really pay into that ecosystem I mentioned earlier in this conversation I'm helping each other up the mountain and if as salespeople were thinking of helping our customers up the mountain more importantly than selling them something then we're probably gonna be more successful and and that looks like in the HR space of how are we driving the idea of innovation in terms of delivering employee experiences and so whatever it is that your product or service does it fits somewhere in the employee experience and you taking the time to do the research or fund the research or the do you know do the white paper on it that helps put information into that ecosystem of provoke provoking new thoughts do people I need to think about and to drive positive change then presenting that in a way whether it's through an email that that actually delivers value right in the first email not hey I want to sell you something but hey I'd like to share something with you that you might find interesting setting up those meetings saying hey noticed you're coming to this conference while you're there I noticed you downloaded two of our white papers love to introduce you to Jane Smith who's our you know CEO who's gonna be there and she would love to have a conversation with you to share with you some of our latest research that might be of help to you whether you buy our product or not just some new things for you to think about that feels like a really natural interaction to me that says that salesperson is committed to my success even more than to their own [Music] you [Music]