Almost every successful salesperson I know can point to one or a few people who were instrumental in their success. They can name the mentors who encouraged them, showed them the error of their ways, and helped them overcome obstacles. I started my sales career with Jantzen Sportswear. I apprenticed with one of their top reps, Kent McCreight in Minneapolis for ten months before taking on my first sales territory. That experience with Kent was invaluable. He was a seasoned professional who took time with me and served as a great role model for me. My next mentor, Tom Hopkins, was a virtual mentor. I bought two of his series of sales and success tapes and listened to them over and over as I drove thousands of miles in my territory.
I started working for Tony Robbins in September 1988. The manager of the sales team was Michael “Hutch” Hutchison. Almost twenty years later, he is still a mentor and one of my closest friends. Here are some ideas to make a difference in his role as a mentor. If you choose to become one, the first question you will ask yourself is why?
Typically, a mentor has achieved great success and is a role model for others. Sometimes the mentor is in later stages of his career and sometimes he can tune out and tune out. Mentoring provides a way to re-engage the mentor and get them turned on again. For example, in the act of teaching someone else, the mentor may begin to see a new role in contributing to the company, may “catch” some of the protégé’s enthusiasm, and reinvigorate himself. They will be motivated to set a strong example and challenge themselves to re-execute the disciplines that got them to the top in the first place.
A good mentor should reassure his new protégé that he didn’t learn the business overnight. Anything worth doing right is also worth doing wrong. You don’t master anything worthwhile quickly. They should know that you don’t expect perfection. Your expectation should be steady progress. They must be allowed to learn by doing, and doing means making mistakes and learning from that experience.
1. Often the protégé is in the enthusiastic beginner stage, where he can easily be overwhelmed with too much criticism. Look for specific areas of improvement and praise them. Find the right opportunities to tell them you see greatness in them. Instead of always telling them what they should do differently, ask them how they could have improved in a given situation.
2. Keep them focused with a specific plan of attack. Explain the three to five key daily activities that will drive your performance and create a scorecard for reaching a goal and your actual results. You can track your progress on a daily or weekly basis, but keep in touch. As a mentor, you can’t coach them on what you can’t measure.
3. Get them a journal as a gift. Encourage them not to rely on their memory and to write down what they are learning and enjoying. Tony gave me my first Diary and now I have 18 precious issues. It’s a great way to capture moments you’d normally forget. You can use it as a scrapbook of achievements and lessons.
4. How you “tell the story” of what you and your company do for customers is critical. For a mentor to role model on a sales call, the protégé must be invited to watch as often as possible. Get permission to record the customer’s or prospect’s sales call and tell them you’d like to use it for training purposes for your ward. Repeatedly listening to yourself and others at your best will dramatically reduce the learning curve.
5. It’s tempting to solve your problems. This is not tutoring. By solving their problems, you take away their opportunity to educate themselves and their ability to solve problems on their own. People learn best when faced with new challenges, plus they gain the skills to solve more difficult problems. It develops self-esteem and the belief that they can handle any situation once they are on their own.
Being a successful mentor is a great experience and generates a great feeling of satisfaction. Being able to drastically reduce someone’s learning curve is a great gift and of course a cost saver. It gets the person up to speed faster and also reduces the failure rate. It can even be an informal relationship over the phone. Keep these five points in mind to make you even more successful.
