Run Away from Human Resource Departments

For years I've said to run as fast as you can from selling booklets in bulk to human resource departments of companies. The report of a recent event confirmed that one more time. Yes, I know some corporations have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of employees. And those employees can definitely use what you've written to improve their life in some way. All seems very logical and reasonable, you're right.

Then comes the rub.

HR departments have a different mindset and a different budget than the sales or the marketing departments of that same corporation. A sale to the HR department squarely sits on the "expense" side of the ledger, and is historically a much smaller and harder sale to make. A sale to the sales or the marketing department or to a product manager has the ability to bring more revenue to the corporation because your product is being used as an incentive attached to a sales campaign. And the universe for the sales or the marketing department or through a product manager is much bigger than that of HR. The folks in sales and in marketing know they have to spend money to bring the company money. HR doesn't have that point of view.

It looked like a particular booklet author was lined up for a large sale during this past month. The decision makers all liked the booklet a lot. Even though we heard that the booklet was being reviewed with the intention of distributing it to employees, the sale came looking for the author rather than the author looking for the sale. What was unknown until a couple weeks into the dealings and diminishing response about the progress was that there was internal fighting about who should pay for the purchase -- human resources or IT (information technology). We have no clue how IT came into this, but they did. The sale is now on indefinite hold. It may surface at some point in the future, though it would be surprising if it did.

Keep this in mind as you are formulating your own marketing efforts. If a sale lands in your lap from an HR department, by all means, fill the order. Otherwise, there's many other fish to fry in the sales, marketing, and product manager arenas.

Until next time,
Paulette - preferring to make life (and sales) as easy as possible
www.tipsbooklets.com