How Did I Get Here?

No, seriously. How did I end up in Sales Training?

As a practitioner of HR for over <coughtwentycough> years, my interactions with the Sales Organizations were either in an HR Business Partner capacity, or as a member of the Shared Services team that handled the aftermath of company holiday parties. Certainly, you’ll agree that sales folks know how to make the most of a party. Because it's true. Because they are fun.

A few weeks ago, I attended ServiceNow #SharkCamp in Santa Clara representing the HR Product Line Sales Organization. I knew I’d get something out of it, but was completely wrong in what the learning might be.

Anytime you hear ‘sales training’, or at least anytime I heard the term, I envisioned classes that would help the target audience sell more stuff - no matter the cost (to the company or the client). I assumed I’d be baptized in the pool of ServiceNow, helped to learn the ‘schpiel’ and then tested in front of my peers. Only part of that happened – but also, a little magic, self-reflection and lot of gratitude happened as well.

By design, people from all over the world came to Shark Camp – mostly people that have been at the company less than 3-4 months, with the exception of a few that were there no more than six. My team (‘The United Nations of NOW’ – Team 4 – Holla!) was comprised of people from Australia, South Africa, Germany, Japan and the US – this was a team of just 6! The class size (about 60) had at least 10 more countries represented. It was awesome.

After we got our initial pleasantries over with, we focused in on what we wanted our personal vision statements to be for our roles. The exercise was particularly helpful for me, as I knew what my role was, but my tendency to be long winded (wait, are you still reading? Thanks!) sometimes gets in the way of impact. Here were my final contenders:

1. Evangelize ServiceNow to help transform HR
2. Enable thought leadership at companies wanting to better the employee experience
3. Transcend the way HR has always operated
4. Engage HR leaders that are striving to transform HR
5. Accelerate HR Transformation by sharing our platform
6. Evangelize ServiceNow to help HR transform

The common denominators for me were transformation, evangelism, and employee experience.

As I made my way through the week of speakers, exercises, elevator pitches and side-bars, the consistent thought I had was:

• ‘Dude, I have made a really good company choice’ 
• The cultural demand for customer-first thinking (that’s how I was ‘raised’ at Intuit! – shoutout to my Intuit family!) was clear
• I will always be supported when I make decisions and recommendations with the customer in mind, even if it means we aren't the right solution for that client

I am here to help make the employee experience, at any company that will sit down with us to talk about possibilities, better. Great, even. HR Service Delivery and the #NOW HR Platform is more than a ticketing system to answer questions. It’s the tool that gets Doctor’s back to healing. Software Engineers back to coding. Teachers back to teaching. It allows employees to do the work they were hired to do. Great work. Meaningful work. Not hunting down Jason in Benefits to ask about expensing lawn darts for the fitness reimbursement, or Carmen in Compensation to ask about a job level.

Ask a question, get an answer. It's just that simple.

In the end, this ‘Sales’ training not only taught me to be able to speak about our products in an effective way, but to proselytize the need for great employee experiences enabled by consumerizing those experiences.

So which personal vision do you think I selected?

#6 - Evangelize ServiceNow to help HR transform

Big shout-out to everyone that helped teach me, and my classmates, the way! I’d be remiss if I forgot to personally thank my team – we achieved our goals of having fun and learning a ton. A big thank you Takeshi Higuchi, Jens Mosig, Shahzad Hussain, Andrew Coffey and Michael Chevalier. And of course Scott Chamberlain and Amanda Gold. How just you two facilitate this amazing program is amazing!