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| SALES HINTS... |
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Much has been written about the fact that top salespeople won’t necessarily make the best managers. You can change this by ensuring that your company moves forward, and not backward by creating a mentoring culture within the company that encourages employees to continue learning, growing and developing toward leadership roles. Creating a mentoring culture is a complex process, but the payback is significant. People being mentored become more adept at risk taking, perform at higher levels and tend to become more visionary thinkers because they are more content in their role. Mentees, who eventually move into a sales management position, are likely to know what they’re doing from day one, and have the leadership skills to succeed and a deep-rooted commitment to the company. Here are six of tips to start the process to becoming a mentoring company... 1. Define the purpose, scope, target population, learning outcomes and benefits. Doing this creates a level of readiness, and a set of expectations for everyone connected with the mentoring programme. 2. Articulate roles and responsibilities of programme participants. If ignored, this step can be a big stumbling block to success. If roles and responsibilities are not defined, multiple, and often unrealistic, expectations are created. 3. Establish mentee and mentor criteria. Clarify who is eligible to participate in mentoring, and what is the ultimate basis for selection. At the same time, select the actual mentors, ensuring thast, above allelse, they have credibility. 4. Ensure visible support from the top. Leadership in the organisaiton must champion the mentoring effort, and encourage other leaders to do the same. They must talk about the value of mentoring, and share their own mentoring stories. 5. Plan rollout and full implementation. Start with a pilot programme so you can learn your lessons on a small scale, before doing a full implementation. Establish a timeline for both the pilot rollout, and full implementation. 6. Gather and share stories and best practices. Stories inspire. Best practices inform. One of the keys to selling, inspiring and galvanising participation in beiong coached and mentored is being able to relate to the real-life mentoring experiences of peers, colleagues and role models. Gather the success stories of great sales managers who were mentored and use them to galvanise support for a mentoring programme. Then get your salespeople with promising leadership potential into the programme.
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