HR's Role in Discovering New Revenue Sources

Organizations continuously look for new sources of revenue to meet stakeholder expectations of growth, increased market share, or their own expectations for financial outcomes. Therefore, tapping into new sales channels or lead sources is always appealing. Of course, revenue generation begins with the sales function within an organization, but it doesn’t have to end there. There are a myriad of untapped human resources (invisible levers) within organizations that could, and should, be mobilized to generate sales for the company. Many organizations have not yet come to the realization that they can turn their entire workforce into “part-time account executives.” There are thousands of potential customers who are not focused on and possibly lost forever, because of a completely underutilized resource—the company workforce. Thousands of non-sales employees, who have thousands of contacts outside of the organization, are going untapped because their company does not promote sales activity outside of the sales department. Just two examples of this could be instituting a referral program or expanding job responsibilities of existing client-facing employees. Companies experiment with these initiatives on a daily basis, with mixed results. What is the role of Human Resources in discovering and maximizing this invisible lever, and how can the employee data be used to assist this process?

Human Resources has a two-fold role in this capacity. First, Human Resources will play its more traditional role in helping with tasks such as job-design or referral incentives. Second, and most importantly (because it is rarely done in most organizations), Human Resources can leverage its wide variety of employee data to understand drivers of employee referrals/sales conversion rates. To do this, Human Resources must, of course, gain access to the referral/sales data for the target employee population. That information enables Human Resources to determine what drives employees to turn in sales opportunities and, further, how they can use that information to improve the operating units that are not getting their employees to participate and sustain the performance of those units that are getting results from their people. This is truly the great potential that exists when you break down data silos and connect employee data to real business outcomes. The lead-generation data (on its own) is a great tracking tool to allow you to see where the organization currently stands and to track progress, but it does not tell you why the results are the way they are, nor does it tell you what you need to do in order to impact and improve those results. It is simply a scorecard. At the same time, HR data around employee opinions, competencies, training, and employment tenure, etc., is also a “nice to have” on its own. It can give great insights into the work environment and the overall abilities of the organization. However, employee engagement, job satisfaction, or great leadership competencies are not business outcomes. These data have the sole purpose of being drivers of business outcomes. Meanwhile, very few organizations are using these data to demonstrate how they are driving business outcomes and determining where investments should be made to reach those outcomes. Bringing together the business development leaders and Human Resources to discuss connecting their data for the good of the company (in this case, revenue generation), is critical for competitive advantage. This does reap substantial financial rewards for the organization.

Excerpted from Scott P. Mondore and Shane S. Douthitt, Investing in What Matters: Linking Employees to Business Outcomes (SHRM, 2009).