Most coaches, consultants and trainers approach HR Directors the wrong way, and they wonder why they never hear back. Unfortunately (for HR Directors!) they’re some of the most contacted professionals on LinkedIn – and often receive a high volume of (poor) supplier approaches every week.
This means that they’ve developed extremely effective filters for ignoring the ones that aren’t immediately relevant or useful. This article explains what HR Directors are actually looking for in an external supplier approach, and how to position yourself so that your message gets through.
Who is the HR Director and why are they the right buyer?
There are a variety of roles inside HR departments – and if you’re an external supplier providing coaching, consulting, speaking, training or done-for-you services into organisations, it’s quite likely that you’ll come across the HR function during the sales process.
It’s also really important to note that there are a variety of roles inside HR departments – and as they’re important to the sales process, you should spend some time understanding what the roles are and their priorities.
From a sales perspective, the HR Director is the person most commonly responsible for buying external coaching, leadership development or training in most small to mid-sized organisations. However, they usually work in tandem with other teams such as Learning and Development.
For most coaches and trainers selling to corporate clients for the first time, the HR Director is a good starting point. They hold the people development budget and are measured on outcomes like talent retention, leadership effectiveness and engagement scores, and they are actively looking for suppliers who can help them hit those numbers.
The challenge is not getting access to HR Directors. They are findable on LinkedIn, they attend industry events, and many are quite active online. Often, this is where external suppliers get stuck – because they have easy access to HR Directors but their lead generation approach often gets ghosted… and that’s because the big challenge is approaching them with specific messaging that makes them want to talk to you.
What do HR Directors actually want from an external provider?
Before you write a single message or make a single phone call, it helps to understand what the world looks like from the other side of the conversation.
An HR Director who receives a cold approach from a coach or trainer is doing a rapid mental checklist:
- Do I recognise this problem?
- Is this person credible / expert enough to solve it?
- Is the timing right?
- Is the transformation that it’ll provide going to be worth the effort of getting it approved?
The approaches that get through are the ones that immediately answer at least the first two of those questions.
What HR Directors are not looking for:
- A long description of your methodology
- Your personal story.
These things may be important to any copywriters that you’ve hired to work on your website – but they’re not relevant in a first conversation with an HR Director. And they may not ever be relevant to the sales process.
What they are looking for:
- Evidence that you understand a problem their organisation is facing.
- That you understand the commercial consequences of that issue.
- That working with you is going to bring about a key transformation / result to fix the problem.
The most important part of any outreach to an HR Director, is being able to demonstrate that you understand the commercial problem(s) that they’re facing… not another vague ‘I work with senior leaders to help them become the best version of themselves at work’.
Instead, you need a clear sentence that an HR Director reads and thinks, ‘this is exactly what’s happening with our senior team right now…’
Those who are able to articulate the key commercial problem that HR Directors are responsible for managing, are those who will win the business.
How do I actually approach an HR Director?
Approaching an HR Director and getting them to book a qualified sales call with you doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, I teach clients how to approach HR Directors (and other cold leads) and get them onto sales calls in less than two hours per week inside my Cold Email Outreach Conversion course.
If you’re looking to approach HR Directors to position your coaching, consulting, speaking, training or done-for-you service offerings, then you’ll need to consider:
Where you’re going to approach them: You can use LinkedIn or cold email to effectively target and approach HR Directors inside organisations but if you want higher response rates, then the data points to using cold email outreach and being directly inside their work inbox. LinkedIn can be great for finding the right point of contact, but they may be using the platform for their own recruitment / job search, instead of using it to access external suppliers.
What you’re going to say: Three to four sentences maximum for an initial outreach message. HR Directors are busy and often reading on their phones between meetings. Anything longer than four sentences will not get read.
Lead with their world, not yours. Start with a reference to something specific: their organisation, their sector, a challenge that is publicly known to be affecting their industry. This demonstrates that you are not sending the same message to five hundred people, even if the structure is similar.
Name the problem before you name the solution. Before you mention that you are a coach or a trainer, name the business problem you solve. Being able to name their problem(s) first indicates that you’re someone who understands their context rather than someone who is selling a generic service.
Ask for a conversation, not a sale. The goal of any outreach message to an HR Director is to book a sales call. That is it. Do not include your prices, do not attach your brochure, and do not ask them to visit your website because those all delay the sales process (which can only start once a sales call takes place!)
A message that follows this structure will outperform a polished brochure every time! And remember, if you want to know exactly how to target organisations, approach HR Directors and use the proven templates that my clients use to book qualified sales calls every month? Grab Cold Email Outreach Conversion now.
What should I say in the first meeting with an HR Director?
Booking the meeting is one thing – but most coaches, consultants, speakers, trainers and done-for-you service providers lose the sales opportunity when they get onto the call. Generally entrepreneurs who aren’t experienced salespeople or who haven’t had clear sales training will experience one of two things:
- Being interviewed: Inexperienced sellers will often find that the HR Director leads the call and starts with ‘Tell us what you do / how you can help us’ which usually results in everything that the coach / consultant says being dismissed as ‘we’re already doing / already tried that’ and leads to a call that results in ‘check in later down the line’.
- Poor problem identification: Inexperienced sellers will often struggle to diagnose a specific problem on the sales call; experiencing either an HR Director with lots of issues that they’re relatively vague about or discussing problems that they’re not bought into solving. This often leads to the call ending with ‘just send me a one-pager / link to your website and I can keep you in mind’
With sales calls, it’s imperative to focus on three key areas so that you can walk away having clear next steps (ideally submitting a qualified proposal!)
- Agenda: Setting a clear agenda for the call demonstrates that you’re taking charge of the call and allows you the opportunity to ask questions of the HR Director before jumping into a panicked pitch. Your agenda can be super simple for example; ‘So that we can maximise our time together today, I’d love to make sure we cover AREA 1, AREA 2’ This will also help you to keep the call on track and bring it back to relevant topics if you or the HR Director go off on a tangent!
- Diagnostic Questioning: Sales are made when there is a clear, commercial problem to be solved. Spending time focused on asking diagnostic questions like ‘What do you see as being the biggest challenge when it comes to signposting neurodiverse employees to helpful resources?’ If you struggle to get HR Directors (or any decision-makers!) to identify specific problems and get their immediate buy-in to wanting to pay you to solve that problem, then you should grab Smash Your Sales which will give you all the questioning techniques (and customisable question lists) to help you nail your next sales call!
- Setting clear next steps: The worst thing that can happen on a sales call is having a great conversation with a decision-maker that you get along really well with and who understands the problem… only to be ghosted after the call ends! This typically happens when clear next steps aren’t set. All you need to do is use a simple sentence like ‘Great – so I’m going to go and create your proposal and send it over on DATE so that you can review it by DATE before our next meeting’ This removes any awkwardness when following up outstanding actions from calls and makes life easier for bot you and the HR Director!
Essentially, a sales call with an HR Director is a huge opportunity for coaches, consultants, speakers, trainers and done-for-you service providers to win business – and if you’re using best-practice sales call techniques, you’ll find that your sales calls go from feeling nice to signing corporate contracts much more quickly!
My clients are using Smash Your Sales Calls to close their sales calls at 75% + so if your current sales calls feel good but aren’t closing at the rate that you’d like? Check out Smash Your Sales Calls now so that you can have productive conversations that get immediate buy-in and generate premium corporate clients.
Final reminder, HR Directors buy from people who are able to give them clarity on the problems that they face and help them build a business case to pay to solve the problem not those who talk fluently about their personal story or methodology. If you struggle to do this successfully and find yourself falling into giving free consultancy / free advice or free education then grab Smash Your Sales Calls now.
What are the most common mistakes when approaching HR Directors?
Approaching at the wrong level. In smaller organisations, the HR Director is the right person. In larger organisations, the Head of L&D or L&D Manager is often the more relevant buyer for coaching and training services. Approaching a Group HR Director at a FTSE 100 company about a coaching programme for one team is approaching someone too senior. Know the size of the organisation before you decide who to contact.
Generic messaging. “I am a leadership coach with fifteen years of experience and a passion for helping leaders reach their potential” is invisible. Every leadership coach on LinkedIn has a version of this message. The only way to stand out is to be specific about the problem and the context.
Following up too soon or too aggressively. HR Directors are busy. If you send a message and do not hear back within a week then polite, relevant follow up messages sent at regular intervals work well to get replies and book sales calls. Remember, you’re looking for calls and to start conversations so make sure your approach is courteous… avoid ‘hurt’ or passive-aggressive sounding follow ups like ‘I guess you’re just too busy to fix SPECIFIC PROBLEM’ because that’ll get you blocked for good!
Not following up at all. The other extreme is equally common. Most HR Directors do not respond to a first approach, not because they are not interested, but because they are dealing with twelve competing priorities. Our Cold Email Outreach Conversion course shows that the fortune really is in the follow up with over 80% of call bookings coming after the third follow up!
How long does it take to book a meeting with an HR Director?
Over the last ten years, I’ve taught over 30,000 people how to best-practice B2B sales and my proven Cold Email Outreach Conversion process helps participants generate an impressive 15-20% response rate with one third of those responses turning into immediate sales calls. This means that our clients typically see qualified sales calls with HR Directors being booked within 4 weeks of implementing the method and templates provided inside Cold Email Outreach Conversion.
However, other outreach programmes boast of 4% reply rates… so your ability to book meetings will vary significantly depending on whether you’re using a proven, tested process or testing it out on your own with limited data and information.
It’s also important to remember that whilst response rates can seem low / slow in comparison to selling to individuals, the contracts are worth significantly more (by 5X on average) and that a well-run outreach campaign stops you wasting time on unqualified sales calls (with junior employees / wrong decision-makers or those who are simply there to ‘connect’!)
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Jess Lorimer is the founder of Selling to Corporate® and has helped over 30,000 coaches, consultants, speakers, trainers and service providers across 17 countries win corporate contracts. She is a TEDx speaker and the host of the Selling to Corporate® podcast.