Peculiar Business Combinations that (You Think) Mightn’t Work Well Together but Actually Do

Change your perspective

Let’s start with a fun food exploration exercise.Take your time and consider each food pairing listed.For each one, what does your brain and taste buds tell you? Yummy or Yucky?

• Red hot chillies and rich dark chocolate (The Spice Peddler does a wicked chilli chocolate fudge cake).

• Succulent ripe mango and plump prawns (Caribbean vibes).

• Earthy beetroot and smooth chocolate (the secret of the ‘red’ in red velvet cake).

• Bacon and maple syrup (imagine with yummy fluffy pancakes).

• Ice cream and olive oil (not any old oil - it’s got to be the premium stuff).

• Peanut butter and jelly (jam, for the Brits).

Yummy or Yucky?

These odd food pairings of contrasting textures and flavours may prompt a stomach-lurch rejection. Your brain may even try to disconnect from your taste buds.

But if you have ever tried any of these or your own odd flavour combination, you know that the pairing of weird and different is often the path to delicious revelations. Take childhood favourite peanut butter and jelly; the once unusual salty and sweet combination is now positively pedestrian.

Intrigued? I do hope so. There’s every ingredient for an unexpected and satisfyingly tasty experience.

Read on.

HR and Sales: A Peculiar Business Combination?

In my home we have a rule which we put in place around the time we were trying to encourage our daughter to eat her veggies when she was younger.Veggies were just the beginning. Once the green, orange and yellow enemies were conquered, we swiftly moved her onto eating chicken and fish that weren’t in a ‘nugget’ shape. We were on the way to cultivating a mind open to trying new experiences.

“Before you say yuck, you must try first.”

Go on, give HR and Sales a go. You might be surprised.If you have an appetite to venture off-menu, read on.

We’re All in Sales Now

In last week’s post I wrote that I was reading Dan Pink’s provocative bestselling book ‘To Sell is Human’. What a brainpoke!Throw out all thoughts of sleazy, slimy, cheating, manipulating sales techniques. Sure it exists; but that’s not the kind of ‘sales’ he is advocating.Today, the value of sales is the business of…

“…moving others. We are moving people to part with resources – whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention – so that we both get what we want.”

For HR this means;

“non-sales selling: the ability to influence, to persuade, and to change behaviour while striking a balance between what others want [candidate, employee] and what you [the organisation, leader, manager] can provide them.”

Bottom line, to sell is human!I got it. I really did. But I have to admit I struggled a little to see how sales could work well together with different areas of HR. I needed to digest and absorb it in bite-sized HR morsels for the full aha! to hit home.

Tapas Style Conversation Starter

I love tapas. A variety of hot and cold snacks, combining familiar and unfamiliar ingredients. Delicious on their own but even more scrumptious when shared. Inspired, here's my tapas approach to discover if HR and Sales could be a tasty combination.

Try some HR and Sales tapas, made with ‘familiar’ HR ingredients, garnished and served with ‘unfamiliar’ sales. Here are some small plates of interestingness to get you started.

¡Buen provecho!

Plate 1: HR Marketing and SalesAs HR Practitioners we finally embraced the fact that we were in the business of branding and marketing. The importance of employer branding and recruitment marketing strategies and activities are typically part of a savvy HR’s daily work.But sales? That was another thing entirely.

But a recruitment ad or campaign is not really sales, you may sniff.Heck yes! Make no mistake a recruitment ad or marketing campaign are sales messages. They are a pitch – a proposition of employment to your candidates.

Sales is too low brow a pursuit for HR.Shift your mind. You are selling.Even more challenging, you are probably selling your organisation’s employment offer in a (over)-crowded market.

Your new reality is here, NOW! You are in the people moving business.You need to be able to grab the attention of your target employee market, influence the right candidates to apply to your organisation, motivate employees to bring their best talent and attitude to work.Being able to write or work with an agency to produce stellar sales copy is now critical. Time to steal some tips from the copywriters. Whether you like it or not, you are also a HR Marketer.

Plate 2: Recruiting and SalesFor a hard-core take on Recruiting is Sales, this week’s wicked-good post by Amy Ala, kills it! Warning, her Recruiting Blogs post is rated ‘R’. No apologies.Reading it is like experiencing a Quentin Tarantino movie – fast-paced, gritty and expletively real. Don’t read if you have a delicate stomach.

Where do you start in the people moving business?Successfully moving people at the recruitment stage, starts with a defined purpose (the plot outline) which is the setting of a compelling story of new possibilities. The candidate is the hero and has the freedom to personalise their role in the story. The tale ends by providing the candidate with clear steps on how to make this new possibility a reality by using a 'Call To Action'. Check out this stellar example of how a recruitment story can move people to act.

Plate 3: Training and SalesImagine training as a sales pitch in 3 acts with specific outcomes to be achieved at the end of each act.In his book, Dan Pink cuts through the fat and zeros in on the most important humans in a pitch. It’s not you. It’s all about your audience.

“After someone hears your pitch…

What do you want them to know?What do you want them to feel?What do you want them to do?”

If you can touch as many of the 5 senses as possible in the entire experience, training is a powerful opportunity to connect, move and transform.

Plate 4: Leading HR and SalesDo you want to be an inspiring and effective HR leader? Taste these amuse bouches from Dan Pink.What to Do. “Serve first. Sell later.”

How to Do it. “Listening, accept, empathise.”

Lead from a position of generosity – sharing your time, knowledge and/or connections. Focus on helping another human being to connect with their dream, realise their aspirations and change for the better.Do you want to see this in action? Read ‘From Recruiting Coordinator to Industry Leader: The Stacy Zapar Story’.

So savvy Recruiter/HR, why not be a little adventurous and try these unusual HR and Sales Combos. What have you got to lose?

You will definitely get results; but what those results will look like will depend largely on you, how you ‘sell’ and the values motivating your action.

My hope is that you might reap astonishingly tasty results that move people and transform HR.

What are your thoughts about HR and Sales? Share your point of view and tips in the comments.

Until we meet again next week down the HR Rabbit Hole…