How to prospect HR leaders
HR Leaders are one of the most difficult personas to cold call : they never pick up their phone
6/9/20264 min read
What's worse than HR Directors?
Between their obsession with enforcing company "culture" (which is often deliberately vague), their strange fixation on candidates' degrees and "life journeys", and their role in protecting management and the corporate hierarchy, they don't exactly have the best reputation.
Just kidding. I'm deliberately being negative here because HR Directors are actually one of the hardest personas to reach through cold calling.
The reason? They rarely pick up the phone, even less often than other enterprise-level decision-makers. Only around 1 in 10, or sometimes even 1 in 15, will answer when you call them.
One of the very few times I failed to generate qualified meetings on the very first day of an outsourced cold-calling campaign was when I first started prospecting this persona.
At the time, I wasn't using a parallel dialer yet (a tool that allows you to call multiple people simultaneously).
My day basically looked like this: spending 90% of my time calling numbers that went nowhere, only to end up with around 10 actual conversations per day.
Not exactly ideal for the first day of a B2B cold-calling campaign, when you want enough conversations to test your pitch and iterate.
In the vast majority of cases, I book at least one meeting on the very first day, even when I'm prospecting a market I initially know nothing about.
Anyway, here's how to approach this rather unusual persona.
HR Directors
There are probably around 20,000 to 30,000 HR Directors in France. They generally only exist in companies with at least 100 employees, making them a fairly enterprise-oriented persona.
That said, they're not necessarily the most enterprise-level decision-makers out there. Quite a few work for larger SMEs, which explains why there are tens of thousands of them in France.
This also makes them a potentially interesting persona to target through B2B growth hacking. Meeting conversion rates tend to be lower when prospecting them through email and LinkedIn sequences, so the size of the market makes it possible to generate a significant number of meetings.
As I mentioned earlier, they rarely pick up the phone, even less often than other enterprise-level personas.
I don't know exactly why. Maybe they spend more time working on-site? Perhaps it's harder for them to answer calls in an open-plan office. Or maybe they're simply targeted by even more cold callers than other decision-makers.
After all, the more a persona gets cold-called, the harder it becomes to reach them through cold calling.
They're typically targeted by all sorts of providers:
Corporate training and e-learning companies.
Recruitment agencies.
HR software vendors (HRIS and similar tools).
Workplace wellbeing providers.
Employee benefits and social protection providers.
Employer branding agencies.
Now, I'm not saying that their low pickup rate makes it impossible to book meetings through cold calling.
When they do answer, they're not the worst persona in the world. Some of them can actually be quite friendly (although that's relatively rare).
With the right prospecting tools (typically a parallel dialer), it's often possible to generate at least one meeting per day, depending on your pitch and offer.
However, as is often the case with enterprise prospecting, it can be worth targeting a less frequently approached persona that's more specialized in the solutions you're selling.
Sometimes, these people are much easier to reach and convert into qualified meetings.
HR Managers
There are probably between 40,000 and 80,000 HR Managers in France.
In some SMEs, they may effectively perform the role of an HR Director, since the company doesn't have a dedicated HR Director.
In theory, they're generally senior enough to be decision-makers.
And given their numbers, they're a very interesting audience to target through email, even more so than HR Directors.
See here how to write cold emails that convert.
However, I wouldn't necessarily say they pick up the phone much more often than HR Directors.
Perhaps they do, but that wasn't my impression when I spent several months prospecting these personas for a first aid training offer.
I managed to generate around 20 qualified meetings in 12 days of prospecting, but that also included QHSE departments, which were significantly easier to reach.
QHSE Directors
QHSE Directors pick up the phone much more often, and I've also found them to be friendlier on average.
That makes sense: compared to HR Directors, they're probably targeted by fewer salespeople because they're a more niche persona.
They handle everything related to Quality, Health, Safety and Environment within companies.
Some will be exclusively HSE Directors, while others will oversee both Quality and HSE.
If your product is even remotely related to these areas, my advice would be to focus on them. They'll generally be much easier to reach.
However, they don't exist in every company.
There are also QHSE Managers, who can be found in many more businesses. But be careful about their seniority: sometimes they're interns or junior employees who are nowhere near being decision-makers, so make sure to check before targeting them.
Conclusion
As is often the case with enterprise prospecting, it's worth looking for secondary personas to make cold calling easier.
Of course, sometimes that's simply not possible, especially when HR Directors are the only people you can realistically target.
But in many cases, you could also try reaching out to:
Talent Managers.
Employee Wellbeing Managers.
HRIS Managers.
Employee Relations Managers.
Learning and Development Managers.
CSR Directors.
These secondary personas will generally be much easier to approach than the mighty HR Director.
On top of that, if your offer is more directly relevant to their responsibilities, your cold-calling pitch is likely to have a much greater impact.
See here how to write effective cold-calling scripts.