How HR and Marketing Can Work Together For Greater Business Impact
While working on various businesses in different marketing and management roles over the years, my interactions with Human Resources (HR) have been sporadic and utilitarian — hiring new talent, exiting non-performers, conducting annual performance reviews, etc. But as I took on more senior roles later in my career, I realized what an incredible business opportunity I had missed. I'm writing this article to capture some of those unique opportunities and how your Marketing and HR teams can work together to impact the businesses they are collectively focused on building positively.
I want to share three key insights on how Marketing and HR can work better together to enhance: a.) enabling employees to deliver incremental effort due to a strong company culture, b.) the link between hiring and the customer journey, and c.) why training is critical to a company's branding.
Future-Oriented Company Culture: Where "Above and Beyond" Effort Comes From — Great brands and strong companies are never accidental — they result from careful planning, thoughtful implementation, and daily reinforcement. A company's culture isn't going to come to life based on a document the CEO or some committee drafted. Instead, it will come from their employees' collective daily behavior regarding what's rewarded and what's rejected.
A proven way to accelerate the growth of a company's culture is when marketing and HR work together to give a company the ability to do more than just keep up with current demand. Ideally, the marketing team can provide enough market intelligence so the business can grow and quickly adapt to changing market conditions. As they are fond of saying in my home state of Louisiana, "It's hard to remember your original goal was to drain the swamp when you are up to your ass in alligators."
To ensure employees feel they are capable of keeping up with the current and changing demands of the business, the HR team should work with Marketing to develop scaled and aligned capacities. This external orientation enables a company to respond quickly to changing consumer needs, competitive activities, and new opportunities.
Incremental effort by employees is always at their discretion. If a business can have its marketing and HR teams work together to create a company culture and internal capabilities that can successfully handle current and future demand, the odds of their employees going "above and beyond" their minimum job requirements increase dramatically.
The Customer Journey and Employee Hiring: "Follow The Yellow Brick Road" — While it's common for the marketing team to describe in loving detail what the ideal customer journey will be like, sadly, for too many businesses, the reality is dramatically different. This "missing link" between what was initially envisioned and what the customer experiences is because the Marketing and HR teams haven't taken the time or effort to figure out what it would take to make that incredible customer journey a reality.
What does this require? It starts with a reality check on what is possible and what resources are available. Suppose a business wants to deliver a white glove experience, but its budget doesn't include all the expenses associated with doing this consistently. If that’s the case, that business is officially headquartered on Mount Delusional.
In addition to ensuring the operational budget is realistic, the HR team can provide invaluable insights on what is practical regarding the employees who can be hired and trained (and what it would take). HR and Marketing can successfully team up to consistently evaluate what’s required to deliver a satisfying customer journey.
When they do this, their customers are more satisfied and loyal, giving their business a sustainable competitive edge. The reward for doing this is that the company will be able to follow its own "yellow brick road" with more revenue growth, profits, and long-term financial value.
Company Branding and Employee Training: "The Employee Is The Message" — Nothing destroys the effectiveness of a great advertising or promotional campaign faster than coming into contact with an employee who contradicts what the company has promised to deliver. But let's not blame it all on the employee — let's start with what the Marketing and HR teams could have done by working together to ensure this doesn't happen.
This ties directly into the previous point regarding the customer journey. Assuming the marketing and HR teams have created the right employee profiles and successfully hired them, the next step is ensuring their training programs are designed to inspire and enable the new hire to succeed.
Companies do this in a variety of ways. Some have extensive orientation sessions for new hires to learn about the company's history and what makes them different from the competition. Others make sure the senior management gets the opportunity to meet and talk with new employees regularly to provide their perspectives on the key challenges the company is facing.
In addition, Marketing can play a critical role in creating compelling branded training materials with HR that are visually appealing and easy to understand. In addition, Marketing can work closely with HR to bring new employees up to speed on understanding the category, product knowledge, branding, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and other vital insights.
So rather than Marketing creating a fictional customer journey with no chance of succeeding, it is imperative they recognize the critical importance of working with their HR partners to spell out precisely what it would take to make it a reality and help create the training processes and materials to bring this to life. This would include developing ongoing measurement systems (such as Net Promoter Score) to track customers’ reactions to what the business hoped to deliver.
HR and Marketing — Better Together For Everyone. Startups typically don't have separate teams for HR and marketing; often, it's the same person wearing multiple hats. But as a company starts to scale, ensuring the HR and marketing teams don't fall into separate functional silos and neglect to work together on key strategic initiatives is essential.
An ambitious, scaling company can ensure HR and Marketing are jointly thinking about the desired customer journey (and what it would take to make it a reality) and enabling new employees to start in a robust, forward-focused company culture. When that happens, the rewards for that company (as well as their customers) are dramatic and sustainable.
Thomvest works with business leaders who have created an outstanding branded portfolio of fintech, proptech, cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity companies. We'd love to hear from you if there is something we can do to help your startup succeed in any of these categories. You can reach me at kip@thomvest.com.
