When our marketing partners talk to me about HR, it is often seen as a dirty word (although RejuvenateHR is working on changing that). I want to take a moment to talk about the joys of people management and how a great HR plan can actually help your marketing succeed, especially if your business only has one full time employee. For single-employee small businesses, all your HR eggs are in one basket; you need to take extra good care of that basket.
Creating the Tone of Your Message
When your customers speak to you or an employee, do they feel your stress? Does your marketing and sales sometimes come across as needy?
Both of these problems are created by having poor HR planning in place. Since HR specializes in the people question: Why do our best employees succeed? When you keep this question in mind, you are able to craft the right HR resources to empower all your employees to succeed at a higher rate than before.
To borrow a homey proverb, when your employees ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
You want a happy welcoming tone, and good HR will make that happy and welcoming tone an honest, natural one.
Impacts Believability
The last thing you want to say to yourself or have an employee say to herself is that your business system doesn’t work. Listening to the HR questions, using affirmation and financial compensation properly, recruiting excellent employees and training or firing underperformers all lend credibility to the idea that your business system works.
Your marketing audience will watch you, sometimes for years, and they are watching to see if you really believe what you are selling.
Qualifies the Sell
Does this sound like a stretch? Believe it. If your employees are better paid than industry standards, are trained more, and have a higher standard for their own work, do you think they will try to serve anyone who walks in the door?
For example, McDonalds can sell something to just about anyone who walks in the door. That’s one of the reason McDonald’s customer facing employees are paid an average of $9 an hour while a more premium company like Ruth’s Chris Steak house pays their hostesses $12 an hour. One company can practically serve anyone, the other sells a premium, technical product. In order to succeed, HR principles show that the one who has to do more qualification also gets paid more.
These are just 3 ways that people management can impact your marketing and sales.
Come back next Thursday for more Human ThuRsdays, when we dive into the world of people management and how it can positively impact your business’s marketing and sales.
What You Do Matters!
~Nathan