How internal comms helped lead a cultural shift at The Home Depot

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference earlier this year, Christina Cornell, director of internal communications for field associates at The Home Depot and Paul Mayer, director of internal communications for non-field associates at The Home Depot, discussed how their teams helped guide employees into a new sales-focused culture that involved a move in mindset toward a “culture of selling.”

“For a lot of our associates and our sales leaders, sell is a four-letter word,” Cornell said. We talk about customer experience, we talk about customer service, we talk about taking care of the customer, but selling — that feels a little icky. We knew we had an opportunity here.”

Mayer said that the internal comms team looked back one of the business’ co-founders for inspiration when forming the ‘culture of selling’ messaging push.

“It was not about how much you could sell a customer when they come into our store, but it’s actually the least amount that you could sell them to solve their problem or fulfill their dream and to create that bond of trust,” Mayer said.“We needed to figure out — how do we get them excited to do that? How do we get them aligned to do that?”