A Digital Talent Hub Can Make Your Sales Team More Agile

Companies typically rely on a series of unconnected databases to manage activities such as tracking applicants, onboarding new employees, and monitoring performance. For sales teams, which typically experience high turnover, there can be advantages to connecting these systems into a single digital talent hub. Doing so can speed the hiring and onboarding cycles, recognize patterns in how hires with certain backgrounds benefit from certain types of training, and better utilize artificial intelligence to nudge salespeople toward specific actions. All of these things can increase salespeople’s productivity and performance.

Turnover among B2B salespeople averages between 25% and 50%, and that means that for many companies, sales hiring, onboarding, coaching, and training are constantly in high gear. That’s why it’s critical to reduce the four to nine months it takes to hire and develop salespeople (even experienced hires) to meet or exceed acceptable levels of productivity. By leveraging data and analytics, sales organizations are acquiring, developing, and energizing better talent, and doing it faster using fewer resources. But the payoffs of speed and impact are only fully realized when the various talent systems work with each other in real time.

Systems for sales talent management are sometimes homegrown, but often come from different vendors. Individually, each system is designed to reduce friction and boost impact in a specific area of talent management. Human Resources (HR) systems streamline employee records, payroll, and benefits for increased efficiency. An Applicant Tracking System organizes resumes and job applications, schedules interviews, and communicates with candidates, reducing the cycle times involved in hiring. Hiring platforms such as LinkedIn Recruiter help find and connect with better candidates. A Learning Management System manages and delivers targeted training. Sales Performance Management systems track and help improve sales performance, while Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems facilitate customer interactions.

Sales organizations can make talent management more market-sensing and agile by connecting these systems through an always-on talent support platform — what we call a digital talent hub. The hub houses digital assets (data, technology, algorithms, and an intelligence engine) that deliver data-based insights across talent management decisions and processes, from designing the success profile, to acquiring, developing, and retaining talent, to enabling sales managers as key participants in these efforts. Through the hub, each system shares data (with appropriate privacy safeguards) and other digital assets (such as AI capabilities) with other systems in real time.

Although a hub can support talent decisions for any job, the opportunity is especially powerful with sales roles. Sales is rich with metrics for measuring opportunities (e.g., customer potential), inputs/sales activities (e.g., customer visits or digital contacts), and outputs (e.g., sales and profits). Sales talent data changes often and decision-making is frequent. Linked data and systems can create actionable insights to improve and accelerate every sales talent decision and process.

Digital Talent Hub – Getting Value Through Linkages

Although customer relationship management (CRM) and sales performance management (SPM) systems are often linked, most recruiting and learning management systems sit in isolation, largely because recruiting and training are managed by separate groups within HR. Some examples show how a hub speeds up talent processes and enhances their impact. With siloed systems, each of these tasks can take weeks or months to complete.

Create better development plans for salespeople.

By analyzing linked data from the sales performance management system (results and goal achievement), CRM system (sales activities), and applicant tracking system (salesperson profile), a hub can feed insights to the learning management system so it can develop a personalized training program for each salesperson.

Direct sales team attention to what’s most important.

A hub enables coordination of the automated nudges generated by disparate systems, increasing sales team focus on key priorities. Consider an example from an enterprise software sales team.

A CRM system uses AI to share the following insight with a salesperson: “Renewal at customer is due in 3 days with potential of $271K. Expansion opportunity for platform product signup within 6 months.” The same salesperson receives a semi-manual reminder from the learning management system: “Do sign up for the ‘Winning by Using LinkedIn’ workshop scheduled for 2pm Friday.” A third system that monitors sales performance issues a rule-based nudge: “Congratulations on the $170K win. Two more and you will be over your quarterly goal!”

The personalized prompts are timely and can be highly effective. The impact can be even greater when systems are integrated so messages can be logically sequenced and spaced. This avoids a situation where too many nudges hit almost simultaneously, and the salesperson acts only on the most urgent nudge, or worse, ignores them all. In the illustration, the renewal is likely to take precedence over the longer-term investment in training. In addition, linkages allow nudges to be targeted better to the person. A skilled person can get the reminder about goal achievement and the prompts about renewal and expansion opportunities, while the training nudge is prioritized for the less skilled person.

Implement a new sales role in half the time.

Constantly evolving sales job requirements affect the ongoing recruiting, onboarding, developing, coaching, retaining, and managing of sales talent. Analysis of sales performance data can identify the skills and competencies of successful people, providing insights for shaping hiring profiles — in real time. New profiles can automatically feed into applicant tracking systems so LinkedIn Recruiter can find candidate matches. Once hired, the learning management system is ready to go to onboard salespeople. The cycle time from role definition to having people working in new roles can go down from a year to months. This does require linking all the systems and supporting the Sales, HR, and Sales Ops teams as they plan and execute the processes.

Assist with sales force downsizing.

When sales organizations make the difficult decision to downsize, it’s critical to make talent decisions objectively, while minimizing disruption to customers and the business. Linked talent systems bring speed and fairness to what is always a painful process. Linkages among sales performance, CRM, and HR systems accelerate the time to identify who stays and who leaves, based on performance, potential, and key customer relationships. Linkages also help with making transition plans for salespeople (those staying and leaving) and for disrupted customers.

Many tools are available to help sales organization on their journey to a more digital and connected approach to talent management. Oracle, for example, uses its own integrated platform, Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management, to bring all talent data together in a single source of truth. The result is a more connected experience for Oracle employees (including sales team members) — from recruiting and onboarding to performance management, career development, and learning. SAP also offers an integrated solution. However, most companies use what they consider to be best-in-class solutions from multiple vendors, managed by people from Sales, Sales Operations, IT and Human Resources. Connecting these separate systems can be challenging, but doing so can have measurable impact.

The capabilities and impact of a digital talent hub grow over time. Early successes often focus on reducing the time and cost of key talent management steps, and on improving the quality of talent decisions through enhanced visibility into people and performance. Ultimately, a tighter linkage of systems makes sales talent management more market-sensing, agile, and aligned with business strategy.