Smart China Organization

China HR professionals have heard the party line already - “People are this company’s most valuable asset”.  This is usually followed by something about how your company takes a strategic approach to sales and marketing HR. 

Just saying Sales HR is strategic to your China business is not enough.  You have to get senior and line managers to step up and act it.  That means getting engaged with a wide range of people and problems at every level of your company’s sales department.  It’s great to see managers and owners pass responsibility down the line – but there is an unfortunate tendency to treat delegation like a “job finished” check mark on a to-do list.  Delegating is good for your operation – but it isn’t a time saver for line managers until much later.  As the HR person in your international firm’s China operation, you have the responsibility to  make sure that your line managers are using delegation to solve problems and not just finding effective ways to hide them.

How should you make sure you sales managers are doing the right job in the right way?  Here are 5 key areas to check on:
 
1) Are you recruiting well?
Have a manpower plan that means something.  Update it and make sure it integrates with the rest of your business model. If you want to increase the size of your sales team by 50% in 2009, are you going to hire ore supervisors?  Assistants?  Where will you put them all?  Who will train them?    You’re fighting two business trends right now — HQ wants more sales, but they also want to control costs.  This comes down to YOU, the China HR professional.

 2) Are you training well?
To train well, you need an integrated plan with clear-cut goals, milestones and deliverables.    Don’t delegate this one down the HR rabbit-hole and hope for the best.  Training and staff development is strategic – it requires multi-year planning and close monitoring.   That means you have to defend your training budget at the same time you are raising your payroll.  It’s tough to do, but if you don’t have the means to train well then your new hires may not succeed.

 
3) Promote better
Commit to a structure and a chain-of-command, and then staff up accordingly.  Decide on each job’s target profile and then train from within or recruit from the outside to build the machine you want.  Once you’ve promoted, make sure that your new managers are managing – not just selling at a higher level.  If your sales managers aren’t training, supervising and building the business, you have to bring in other manages to do it.  Don’t live the lie that your new recruits are “learning on the job”.  They are learning to find new jobs.

 4) Orient the new employee.
Have an orientation program.  Test it, update it, go through it yourself.  One of the most overlooked and undervalued of all management activities is orientation training.  It is your first – and may be your only – chance to set the tone of your company’s culture, expectations and values.  This stuff matters.

5) Measure what you can
As your company grows, your ability to measure objectively and analyze the data is going to determine your success or failure.  Use off-the-shelf software and technology to build a reliable battery of standardized tests and feedback systems.  Develop a profile of your ideal candidate for hiring, test and appraise during the selection process, and test to make sure your new assets are operating effectively. Most important of all, have all data immediately flow back to senior managers at HQ.   Developing a good system of checks and measurements – and knowing what to do with the data you collect – is going to be another crucial factor to your long-term success.