Lost your marketing mojo? Found your slick salesmanship has slipped? Perhaps what's needed is some mentoring – deep and personal guidance from a master to put you back on top form. Kurt Jacobs finds out how mentoring works, and how it can improve your career prospects.
The wonder wall
Even the very best sales folk hit a wall – a succession of indifferent results that may be stalling their career, or they need help in stepping up to the next great promotion prospect. Instead of yet more training many companies now encourage mentorship with a guru to help staff progress.
Almost all professional mentors are keen to distinguish mentoring from training. "Training is the Harry Enfield School of Management," says professional sales mentor John Sproson. "That's the 'you don't wanna do that, you wanna do this' approach where you teach by rote and show how techniques have worked for others."
Nor is mentoring plonking a sales person next to a seasoned hand and hoping some words of wisdom will run off.
Mike Hughes, who has created a number of in-house mentoring schemes and now runs his own consultancy, adds: "Grabbing the nearest desk head and throwing him together with the new boy to be his mentor is unforgiveable, unstructured and counter-productive. A mentor has the role of a teacher, and no teacher worth his salary would sit with pupils for a day and then say 'off you go – just call if you need help'."
The burning issues
The other area that divides mentoring from training is in the seniority of the mentee. It's taken for granted that mentees know their merchandise and markets intimately, so mentoring looks at a deeper level, at what needs addressing on a personal plane.
Sproson says: "You leave your ego at the door – during sessions I want 100% attention and total honesty. No matter what my plans for a session, you have to tackle the burning issues first and tackle them directly. If there's a problem with colleagues that's holding the mentee back you'll get nowhere unless that's faced and resolved."
Hughes adds: "Crucially, the mentor is needed to be approachable, reliable and understanding. It's not being done right if the person being mentored doesn't look forward to getting together."
Although a mentor is usually appointed and paid by an employer, the relationship is clearly with the mentee and remains highly personal – any conversations between the guide and guided stay secret. The mentee needs to believe that any issues they raise – colleagues, home life, criticisms of the company – remain confidential.
However although the mentor is a buddy, a therapist and a confessor, their ultimate goal is to improve sales performance.
Hughes says: "There must be short-term targets so that the production flow is not hampered, but there must be long-term targets, as well. What can be achieved at the end of one month, six months, the first year?"
The complete salesperson
Most mentor programmes do not deliver sudden epiphanies, where the mentee shouts 'oh, so that's what I've been doing wrong!' and performance dramatically improves after just one session. Instead progress occurs in gradual but sustainable steps. Overcoming a series of issues or gradual realisation is usually better than a one-off result.
Sproson says the successful result of mentoring is a salesperson to whom the task of selling isn't a task – it's simply something they do: "I can tell the ones who try too hard – it doesn't work because people don't like pushy sales people. The ones that are successful are those who are comfortable in selling products and services by being comfortable in selling themselves. That's what mentoring produces.
"People who have been successfully mentored are appointed and promoted because they exude the self-confidence, self-belief and self-esteem that great sales people have. They're comfortable in what they're doing, and succeed by being ambassadors for their business."
Case study
Sproson tells of one successful programme he ran for the son of the founder of a business who was being groomed to take on the role of sales manager.
He says: "He was up for it, and his father thought that he had potential but to become sales manager he had to prove that he had good sales ability.
"We started a series of one day workshops over six months, and at the outset he claimed he'd no management experience. But we talked for a while and, when I asked him about his education, he said he'd run the college events team. If that's not management what is? I got him to realise that he already had many of the skills and experience that he was going to need.
"Rather than going for what I call sheep dip training – total emersion – we thought it better to hold a series of short, sharp sales sessions and then go straight out and apply them. We had one-to-one meetings and I'd also accompany him in some selling situations. We set targets and he delivered them.
"Instead of telling him what to do it was more raising issues and objectives: 'how will you take that forward?' 'That's fine – but other people might have done it this way – would that work for you?'"
