Training and Coaching

How To Become An Effective Sales Mentor

Joshua is a sales mentor at a big MNC who takes initiatives to accelerate the development of sales employees and improve the long-term success of a sales organization. Every company needs a diligent performance coaching model to hone the skills of new and experienced salespeople and introduce them to the company’s core sales skills, goals, and culture.

He is considered a valuable resource to provide context behind every sale that affects the bottom line of the organization.

Coaching and mentoring of salespersons enables organizations to develop the sales team. The sales coach may think ‘What’s in it for me’ – well! As the maxim says, you learn while you teach, it counts as a win-win situation wherein the sales coach also develops:

  • Increase engagement while passing on his knowledge, experience, skill, and expertise to the employees
  • Improved Morale
  • Development of leadership qualities that leads to more engaged leaders in the short-term and long-term company growth

Relevance of Sales Coaching Programs – Facts

  • According to data from RAIN Group, successful sales coaching programs have increased average business size, sales activity, win rates, and new leads by 25% -40%.
  • AI-powered sales performance coaching models are becoming an indispensable part of the sales stack. Forrester predicted that by 2021, more than 60% of B2B sellers will increase their sales strengths with AI and automation tools.”
  • According to Allego’s State of Sales coaching report, three-quarters of companies encourage a formal sales mentoring training program.
  • And organizations that include dynamic sales coaching programs achieve 28% higher profit rates.
  • Businesses that provide quality coaching can achieve 7% higher annual revenue growth.
  • Up to 60% of salespeople say they are more likely to quit their job if their mentor is a bad coach. More than 2/3rds of salesmen who report to a bad coach plan to leave their job.
  • Sales reps who receive 30 minutes or less of sales coaching per week have a 43% success rate, and those who receive at least 2 hours of coaching per week have a 56% success rate.

Sales coaching can drive sales performance if done correctly. The value of sales mentoring programs is multifaceted: they can help accelerate the development of new hires, provide leadership experience for seasoned salespeople, and improve the long-term success of a sales organization.

What is Sales Training?

Sales coaching is a formal mentoring process that includes one-on-one, ongoing lessons from a seasoned sales mentor to improve the performance of sales reps. The sales mentor takes the responsibility to:

  • Guide salespeople to find out how to achieve their goals
  • Correct behaviors of sales reps that have no impact
  • Reinforce the behaviors of sales reps that lead to success
  • Develop the qualitative skills and not just the quantitative deliverables of the sales force
  • Train them on side-by-side coaching call center template

Qualities Required to Become a Successful Sales mentor

Here’s what it takes to become a great sales coach. Always ask thought-provoking questions and ask your salespeople to figure out how best to achieve those improvements. Use technology-based coaching sales techniques to help sales reps get hands-on training on new techniques that can make their job easier.

Create sales coaching models, including interactive sessions and game plans, so you have the employees’ full attention. Mentoring a sales team is one of the most rewarding experiences of a sales career, and the perks and outcomes are worth it. It is an investment of time and effort that can reap exceptional results for the development and growth of all stakeholders – the organization, the leaders, the employee, the customer, and the mentor. To become a great sales mentor, you must display the following qualities:

  1. Experience: First and foremost, mentors need to be experienced. They must understand the nuances of a sales career and should be skilled enough to play the long game.
  2. Integrity: Sales leaders who have earned the respect of their colleagues and clients are known for their integrity. Adored by everyone, great mentors provide the best sales coaching, uphold the best practices and pass them on with ease, comfort, and professionalism to the newer ones.
  3. Enthusiasm: Sales mentors need to be enthusiastic and full of zeal in an obvious or noticeable way. They must share their stories, should have a positive vibe and aura, and instead of telling, they should believe in showing. It is like a game of cricket. If your coach doesn’t demonstrate the thrill of advancing sales, the sales reps won’t either.
  4. Tutoring desire: As a sales mentor, you have been personally chosen to invest in a young person who can benefit from your best practices, knowledge, and experience. Your desire to instill your sales representatives with accurate and appropriate sales trademarks and coaching sales techniques will help them achieve the goal.
  5. Honesty: Avoid sugar-coating and let your reps face the harsh truths of the sales world. You need to come out of your comfort zone and maintain transparency and honesty with the people you teach. You must be well aware of your professional obligations and should always leverage company goals more than personal objectives.
  6. Empathy: You need to put yourself in their shoes. They may not be as skillful and proficient as you are, so learn about their doubts and handle each query differently as per the situation. It is important to have a one-to-one brainstorming session with the group or with individual sales reps and understand their issues. Good salespeople validate and understand a customer’s feelings and know how to convert emotions into problem-solving actions. If that sounds like mentorship, it’s because great salespeople and mentors are always trusted advisors alongside all of their other responsibilities.

The Coaching Outline that Every Sales mentor Must Follow

Identify Company Objectives

To create an effective mentoring program, you must begin by clearly understanding organizational goals to minimize employee turnover, enhance the engagement of everyone involved, and improve the overall business. Chalk out an ideal mentoring program that reinstates the group’s short-term and long-term sales goals.

Develop a formal coaching structure

Sales mentors need to structure cadence to not only encourage management approval but also engage leaders and representatives to attend one-on-one meetings and take responsibility.

Ask effective questions

Before becoming an integral part of the sales structure of an organization, sales mentors were professional sales representatives too. So, it is important to ask relevant questions to understand each sales employee’s psyche and understand the individual training style that needs to be adopted for him.

Nobody wants to listen to instructions. It is not the sales mentor’s job to show the path. Instead, he must understand the hurdles of each employee on that sales path and should guide them on how to walk through it. Get your group to think independently and critically. Your experience can help guide the beginners without them depending on you.

Spend more time in the field

Being proactive is another important factor for improving team performance. This will have a big impact on sales as you will be at the forefront and experience the real-world problems that your team does. So just lecturing won’t do – you need to get some practical information as well.

Become a part of a sales exchange conversation with your team members and assess their performance. See what they do well and focus on what their opportunities for improvement are. Teach them to be better sellers and how they can overcome any obstacles.

Mentoring creates a closer and more engaged team, while your influence gives the extra edge your team needs to reach new heights.

Focus on one skill at a time

Sale is an amalgamation of several factors. You can’t teach them everything all at once – go step by step and polish each skill at a time, or else your salespeople will be overwhelmed with a long list of things to work on. A single focus will allow your sales rep to learn faster, give them a deeper understanding of what they are learning, and the result will be much better.

Let the representatives work out their improvement plan

Once your reps have identified what they want to work on and how they can improve their area of interest. They can express suggestions or concerns by involving them in these steps and gain a greater sense of belonging as their skills improve. There is a boost in faith and trust, which extacts the best results out of the team.

Share best practices

You must coach your sales team on what works and what doesn’t. Focus on areas of improvement or key coaching sales techniques of the sales process that the team missed out on.

Sales mentors have ample experience in the field, so they can help the sales reps with best practices, sales coaching techniques to handle objections, the coolest phrases they can use to close a sale, sales coaching tips on upscaling their communication skills and body language, and so much more.

The WHY Behind Sales Coaching

Measure and quantify value

Sales mentors must implement a quantifying value to assess the success of a mentoring program, so you know if the investment is paying off. You must measure:

  • The activity of the group
  • Development of the pipeline
  • Revenue of closed deals, closing time, etc.

Rewards and recognition

Every mentoring program comes with certification and an added experience for the sales reps. Their learning and applying it to practical experiences enhances growth. Besides this, sales mentors must encourage the participants with rewards and recognition.

You can maybe prepare a wall of fame – and for every technique taught, you can choose the top 3 sales reps to ensure they understood the concept well and applied it diligently in their practical sales. Another way is to take mock sales sessions and rank them accordingly.

Feedback

An assessment is compulsory. The sales mentors need to provide feedback on the performance of the peers and the program itself. Sales mentors should communicate effectively, listen more than talk, and be open and responsive to concerns about program elements, such as responding to objections, expectations, and rigor.

Conclusion

Creating an appropriate sales mentorship structure is important for sales mentoring arrangement. Sales mentoring has a massive impact on the growth of every salesperson, the team, and the overall organization. Sales mentors can simplify the performance coaching model by applying the latest technological tools which are essential for your sales force.

  • It has been observed that organizations that encourage a formal sales mentoring process see 91.2% of the people reaching their goals, compared to 84.7% of companies with an informal coaching process.
  • Sales mentoring bridges the gap between sales performance and knowledge using hands-on sales coaching techniques such as role-playing and 1:1s.

Sales mentoring programs have enormous potential to boost the sales of the company. These sessions help sales reps to build relationships throughout their careers, learn from each other, and eventually grow both personally and professionally.

With over a decade of experience in the SaaS industry, Rahul currently oversees the Customer Success team for the Americas region. He has been a key figure in establishing, scaling, and also crafting the strategic vision for the department. Specializing in the digitization of customer success processes, Rahul excels at creating and executing operational playbooks aimed at boosting customer retention and renewals. Under his leadership, the team has achieved significant gains in NRR and NPS, elevating overall customer advocacy. Over the past four years, Rahul has held similar high-impact roles in various organizations, consistently contributing to their success.

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