Might a Sales Mindset Be Your Key to Total Rewards Success?

WorldatWork’s 2025 Total Rewards Leader Priorities study found total rewards (TR) professionals are strongly focused on modernization strategies around:

Integrated benefits and compensation
Personalized and flexible options
Innovative offerings (e.g., career development opportunities)
Cost control (e.g., healthcare expense management)
Global and regional alignment
Governance consolidation
Much, much more

In pursuing such critically important strategies, many TR pros feel at ease with the ideation and development process — falling back on their compensation and benefits knowledge, functional budget experience and Excel skills. Where some experience less comfort, though, is in communicating the strategy and vision to the C-suite. The latter generally requires the ability to “play to the room,” understand what matters most to them individually and/or collectively, and tell an eloquent, succinct, clear and persuasive story — skills that are more closely tied to sales professionals than TR pros.

To achieve a positive decision on strategies (a.k.a. “closing the deal”), you may need to borrow some leading practices from your sales colleagues. That was the message delivered by Malika Terry and Chandra Walker during a session titled “Selling Your Total Rewards Strategy with Authenticity” at WorldatWork’s recent Total Rewards ’25 conference in Orlando, Fla.

Terry (at left in the above photo) is a former TR corporate leader (UPS, InterContinental Hotels, etc.), current consultant, and long-time WorldatWork faculty member and advisor. Walker (at right) is an experienced sales professional who currently serves as a digital enterprise specialist at Microsoft.

They shared insights on how TR pros can think and act like a salesperson by:

Using authentic communication to build trust and credibility with the C-suite.
Incorporating sales principles, such as active listening and framing value propositions, to enhance their presentations.
Aligning TR initiatives with corporate priorities to demonstrate strategic importance.
Methodically addressing executive concerns, overcoming objections and demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of TR strategies.

According to the speakers, a total rewards strategy, from a salesperson’s perspective, is like a comprehensive pitch that encapsulates the organization’s employee value proposition. It’s about understanding and delivering the ways in which a holistic approach to rewards — including compensation, benefits, recognition and development — can motivate, attract and retain top performers, ultimately boosting what executives are most responsible for: overall sales and business performance.

Check out other Workspan Daily articles from Total Rewards ’25:

Know Your Audience

When communicating TR strategy with the CEO or a room of top executives, Terry and Walker advised to start with the basics.

“Just relax; make it conversational — like you’re talking to a room full of friends,” said Terry. “Back-and-forth conversations are what sales is really about. [Within these interactions,] it’s about building trust, building relationships, showing yourself as resourceful and showing that you’ve done the research in order to connect with the people you’re trying to sell to.”

Connecting comes by truly knowing your audience.

“Do you know them on a personal level? If not, you need to,” Terry said. “Do you know what their hobbies are? What their favorite sports teams are? Do they have a family? What are they involved with outside of work?”

She said that information is important because, in selling your TR strategy, you need to consider how that strategy connects with the audience, professionally and personally.

“For everyone in the room, you are selling to the title and the person,” Terry said. “What they do outside of work brings meaning to and influences what they do at work.”

To get to know “the title,” Terry said to explore internal and external documents that reflect the executive’s priorities and positions. “What have they told ‘The Street’ [about retention, talent acquisition, pay equity, etc.]? How are their views reflected in information on the company website [on the Careers page, About Us page, etc.]?”

To get to know “the person,” Walker advised, “Do research on an executive by checking out LinkedIn, ZoomInfo or a variety of other resources. See the companies they worked at before. Some people post personal things about what they do on the weekends, where they went to school. It can provide a window into their world.”

Walker’s other pro tip: Get to know the assistants and administrative professionals that support C-suite members. Those relationships can pay dividends in terms of information (e.g., understanding true schedule availability), getting messages pushed through, etc.

Deliver to the Room

In presenting to the executive audience, Terry and Walker underscored that:

These leaders are likely short on time.
Their presentation expectations are likely different from yours.

While you may have created a voluminous spreadsheet with built-in pivot tables or a 50-page slide deck, that may not be appropriate for a 15-minute executive meeting.

“Borrowing from sales, the perfect sales pitch is succinct and compelling and focuses on the story,” Terry said. “What’s your story and how do you get that across? My 20-page presentation is not going to go over well with the C-suite.”

So, boil it down and pack a punch. If you need help with your pitch, consider internal or external partners.

During her practitioner days, Terry said she “partnered with the sales and marketing teams that regularly put together three-page succinct presentations. I shared what I had with them, and they condensed it down and gave me advice [on verbiage, visuals, and more].”

For one large-scale compensation plan, Terry recalled seeking presentation assistance from the two vendors that were bidding to be involved in the project.

“I asked them, ‘How can I best sell this to my C-suite?’” she said. “They put all the work in and helped me build really effective presentations that worked to sell the ideas and concepts.”

Closing the Deal

Terry and Walker said TR practitioners also need to tap into one of a sales pro’s biggest strengths: the ability to predict, mull and overcome objections.

“If you can anticipate the needs, you can anticipate the objections,” Terry said. “If I know what you need, I also should know what you don’t want or don’t need. I can take that into account and either eliminate that [objectionable element from the pitch] or I can come up with an effective way to address that objective.”

If an objection comes out of the blue, Walker said, “First, acknowledge what they said. Hear them out. Acknowledge and empathize with them. It’s a shift of perspective. Don’t tell them their perspective is wrong. Instead, offer, ‘Can I give you a different perspective? I’m looking at it this way.’ If you give them a question, sometimes you must be quiet. Don’t interrupt. Give them a moment to think about what you just said.”

Terry and Walker said, in such situations, one sales tool is to use the word “and” instead of the words “no” or “but.” Used in conversations, the latter words can create walls and a stopping point; however, “and” can increase collaboration by allowing ideas to build onto one another.

For instance, Terry said an initial executive objection can be followed up in this manner: “Hey, leader, we have looked at the research and here is the information that you have presented to us. Great idea. And, we took it a little bit further and thought about how it would impact the rest of the organization. And, we think there are these pockets of team members who also could benefit from a program like this. And, we think that if we expand this across the organization, we may be able to get a bigger bang for our buck. And, here is some of the research that supports this.”

Meshing the TR and sales thought processes, she said an ultimate follow-up may be: “We think that if we leverage a widespread program, it may positively impact retention by 5%. And, the talent team told me it costs an average of $85,000 [to replace an exited worker]. So, if we can save 5% of those people, it comes down to x amount of dollars [in annual cost savings/avoidance].”

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

For more information and resources related to this article, see the pages below, which offer quick access to all WorldatWork content on these topics: