Empower your HR team with sales process management for HR

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welcome to world at work TV I'm Alison avalos and I'm joined today by Mark Briggs of Cardinal Health and danya rows of terrace Watson and we're talking about how the HR business partner can contribute to effective selling first start off by talking about why this should be important for HR why why there's an opportunity to lead this the role of the hrbp has changed much in the last let's say five to ten years that rolls become quite a bit more consultative maybe the broker of many of the center of expertise areas within the human resources discipline that actually has positioned the hrbp to participate and lead the design of sales compensation plan they interact with sales leadership on a regular basis they actually are the ringmaster for the design process and it's the opportunity for them actually to broker expertise from the corporate compensation area as well as pull in the people to the table that are needed in order to effectively design and implement sales compensation plans is there something that's changed about HR deployment that is let has letter as leading to a new opportunity in the space for HIV ters we're seeing in consulting of course we look across a lot of different clients more and more HR involvement in the sales compensation planning process whereas there has been a lot of history of sales compensation plans designed by sales leaders by finance as the calculation complexity grows and the sales operations function gets established sometimes that function has taken over as the lead designer there and all of those functional areas have a really important role to play but in the end its compensation and so have the HR comp people involved is really important and having the HR business partner whose role I believe has become more of a business partner involved and active in the design of compensation plans is in my view increasingly prevalent you see it more and more and in more and more companies there are still those companies where HR is somehow excluded from sales compensation design and there are a very few where HR is really central but what I'm seeing is more and more value creation by HR primarily through the HR business partners involvement to HR business leaders need to make that business case though is there are there risks associated with the sales ops team managing this or specific arguments if you will to better support this idea of HR business leaders really heading this way I do believe that there are risks for this one of the primary risks is entering into that role coming to the table maybe without all the the tools without knowledge of how what's the natural order of how a sales compensation plan is designed who are the right people that are to be at the table so the risks would be an HR business partner arrives with their hand in the air to do the work and then fails to kind of bring the right people to the table fails to bring the right tool set to ask the right questions to to ask the strategic aligning questions to move towards defining and getting the rightful message measures into the plan so there are risks to that and it takes a takes a lot of dedicated dedication to learning how that should go I'd say there also are risks to not having the HR person involved in which is an interesting one sometimes have a top that I wear sometimes when I'm going to client engagements it's got black and white stripes going across it and it's appropriate business attire but but I love it because it sort of represents the referee nature of what we sometimes end up doing oftentimes who we r refereeing among is finance sales leadership and sales operations and HR kind of you know who it is finance one finance probably wants to minimize the cost of the compensation plans and stop that crazy upside what do the sales people want the sales people wanted a noble goals they want to be able to retain their best talent and it looks like they just want to spend money but what they're trying to do is retain their best talent and motivate their people so they can hit their numbers what a sales ops want sales will ops wants a straightforward plan that's orderly and sensible to administer what does HR bring to that ideally HR brings the interest of the employee and the company together to try to create a more balanced view so all of those stakeholders belong in this discussion HR i believe is uniquely positioned to wear my black and white striped shirt you know to get in there and be the the order keeper the facilitator the arbitrator and the place that values and respects all of those points of view but isn't any of them and is there on behalf of the employee and the good of the business so what tips them do you have for HR professionals that by themselves in that role the HR leadership needs to arrange the various expertise resources which within the HR function HR bps need to be positioned in the businesses to face off with the leadership teams and especially as it relates to HR VPS that support sales teams and sales organizations that takes a careful alignment and for HR leadership to get the compensation resources perhaps in the case of Cardinal Health a sales compensation design resource that's positioned to support the HR VPS in that work if you've got everyone position in the right place are there any specific considerations that these HR professionals should be looking for you dunya you were talking about everyone in their unique role and their unique / and their unique perspective of how they view sales and the sales role and how that sales role should be compensated what should the HR professional be thinking about as they're doing this refereeing work in you know within the ultimate effort to design an administer and effective sales compensation plan I'd say creating real buy-in if you can have those three sometimes at odds stakeholders understand each other's point of view and collaboratively come to decisions that all of them would say were their own may not be their favorite but that they fully support everything goes much more smoothly there are lots of character lots lots of great ideas and compensation plans that could work for anyone sales role I firmly believe there is not a right answer there are more wrong answers than right answers but there are a lot of right answers but one of the key characteristics of the right answer is that it's affordable in your business model finance is happy salespeople sales leaders know how to take that tool which is the sales comp plan and use it to manage and motivate their people that tool is comfortable in their hands and sales ops has got to be able to administer the thing accurately on time in an orderly way so really respecting all of those points of view and looking for that one of all of the many things that can work that really meets all of those people's needs best and serving as the facilitator for that process is huge value creation then once there's a good decision in a good plan design HR can take a very traditional HR role in change management in helping make sure that everyone who needs to understand something about this how we got here what the plan is how it works how we're going to administer it what the reports need to be there's a lot of now that we've got a decision it's not done everyone who needs to understand all those things has got the kinds of communication that's going to really enable them to understand it and in the case of some of those people enable them to turn around and communicate it to the next level in the organization in a confident persuasive empowering motivating way and that's something that probably of all those functional areas a jar is best poised to do and perhaps even bringing in at that point some of their colleagues from marketing or communication in the organization or outside what's the biggest mistake each of you has seen an HR business leader make in their work with sales compensation I've seen this is a large mistake is an hrbp believing that they need to be the expert about sales compensation design they're more like the ringmaster they don't have to be the one nor should they be the one to give the answer they have to they have to educate that's how they're going to be doing the influencing and they have to create process and discipline around the design work again getting the right people to the table understanding alignments to this sales objectives and business goals but not being there to give the answer that's a large mistake though that I've seen the other side of that just slamming up again the up against the other end of the spectrum here would be the HR leader who too quickly acquiesces to any of those constituencies so in any one organization you can have powerful finance powerful sales usually not powerful sales ops but but in a powerful finance organization it may be that the some leader and Finance gets out an envelope gets out his pencil and designs the sales comp plan and just kind of pushes it down HR dutifully takes notes and starts into communication mode without really asking the questions or listening while the sales people are over there squawking saying they don't like it more often I would see it go the other way where the sales leaders are designing the comp plan and threatening everybody with dire revenue shortfalls if you don't do what I tell you you have to do this year with this plan and so if the HR business partner is too passive and doesn't bring the right constituents to the discussion not that they have to have the main points or take the strongest position I think their role is best when they are just making sure everyone who has a valuable point of view and important information to provide is heard they can really create value so if they're too passive you know mark just suggested they could be a little overconfident and step outside of their real expertise and try to be everything if they don't step up to be something you can also see some problems so there needs to be some balance thank you both for worldatwork TV I'm Allison avalos