Why You Should Have a Sales Mentorship Program (And How to Get Started)

Experience, they say, is the best teacher, but nothing beats the support and encouragement of a mentor who has once walked the same path.

A recent analysis showed that sales representatives that participated in a mentorship program fetched 18% more revenue than those without a mentor.

The consensus? A sales mentorship program can help boost the performance of your sales teams. To start a sales mentor program at your organization, you should keep a few things in mind:

• Define the goals of the program. What do you hope to achieve?
• Create a structure for the program. How will it be organized and operated?
• Identify potential sales mentors and mentees. Who would be a good fit for the program?
• Communicate the program to everyone involved. Make sure everyone knows what to expect.
• Have proper collateral like a sales deck in place for better presentation.

In this article, we’ll share all you need to know about sales mentorship and how you in HR and L&D can build a sales mentorship program at your company.

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What is a sales mentorship?

A sales mentorship is a professional relationship where an experienced salesperson provides guidance and support to a less experienced colleague. This relationship exists between two sales personnel, where one sales rep is more experienced than the other in the field with a credible track record.

The goal of a sales mentorship is to help the mentee improve their sales skills and knowledge and ultimately grow professionally.

How to tell if your company needs sales mentoring

If your management or senior leadership have noticed some challenges with your sales team, it might be time to consider how to mentor sales reps and address issues or performance gaps.

Here are five indicators your sales team could benefit from mentorship:

1. Team members don’t have clear opportunities for personal or professional growth and self-improvement.
2. Sales leaders are struggling to manage their responsibilities or adjust to new demands.
3. Productivity has dipped and some teams or individuals are having a hard time reaching performance expectations.
4. Employee engagement levels are waning—meaning less participation, enthusiasm, and connection to the company as a whole.
5. High new hire turnover rate, signalling onboarding issues and lack of support.

These red flags can all be addressed by a mentorship program, but be sure to evaluate other causes that may be contributing to these challenges.

What are the benefits of sales mentoring?

The great thing about a sales mentorship program is that it benefits not just the mentee, but the sales mentor and the company as a whole too. Let's look at some of the benefits of mentoring your sales team:

Boost sales team morale

A successful sales mentorship will boost the confidence of your team members and make them feel more supported in their roles. This leads to improved performance and motivation as they feel that the company wants them to succeed. Happier, better supported sales reps are able to sell more effectively.

Improve team engagement

Another benefit of sales mentoring is the reps are more likely to become active participants in the company and more motivated to contribute to the company’s success. When they see the company succeeding, they take pride in their contribution and feel more connected to the bigger picture. This creates a cycle of engagement, productivity, and loyalty. Mentorship and other development programs are key retention factors as well, with 76% of employees saying they’re more likely to stay with a company that offers learning and growth opportunities.

💡Read about 7 more employee engagement ideas

Develop their soft and hard skills

Mentoring your team broadens their horizon and expands their skill sets. Through skills-based learning, mentees learn how to communicate effectively during negotiations, among other relevant skills. Skills-based training through mentorship helps your sales reps gain new and develop existing skills to help them thrive in a long-term, successful sales career. For example, a sales mentor program can greatly benefit entry level business development reps because your more experienced senior salespeople can provide guidance, support, and industry and company-specific knowledge, allowing mentees to improve and grow within the company.

Improve the organization's culture

Sales mentorship doesn't just boost sales but also helps improve company culture. Enrolling your sales team in mentorship equips them with all the relevant knowledge about workplace ethics, policies, rules, and regulations while helping them with internal networking and relationship-building. This creates a closer, more cohesive team culture.

The ideal sales mentor

So, who makes a great sales mentor? Choosing senior salespeople to mentor sales teams is the obvious answer, but it’s far more nuanced than that. An ideal sales mentor is a guide, a coach, a cheerleader, a source of inspiration, as well as an accountability buddy to their mentees.

Here are a few traits to look for when recruiting potential sales mentors:

• Industry expertise: The mentor has a strong working knowledge of the industry and your company’s products or services, making them able to provide specific insights into market trends and customer needs.
• Great communication: Strong mentors communicate clearly and consistently with tailored advice for the unique strengths, weaknesses, and potential of their mentee.
• Lead by example: Mentors set a high standard by demonstrating ethical practices, resilience, integrity, and a results-driven approach.
• Connects easily: Great sales mentors prioritize relationship building with their mentee to create a meaningful, trust-based mentorship.
• Empathetic listener: An ideal mentor understands the challenges their mentee faces and balances empathy with constructive feedback to encourage growth.
• Growth mindset: A great mentor is encouraging and pushes their mentee to step outside their comfort zone, nurturing creativity, adaptability, and long-term development.
• Invested in success: A person who chooses to mentor sales reps needs to genuinely care about their mentee’s achievements and tie those successes to their own.

By embodying most or all of these qualities, a sales mentor can truly inspire and nurture their mentee.

6 steps to launching a sales mentorship program

Careful planning is the key to success in anything—including launching a sales mentorship program. In this section, we’ll walk you through six steps to plan and launch your sales mentoring program.

1. Identify individual, team, and organizational goals

Identifying what you want to achieve will be your guiding light throughout the planning process. Here are a few steps to help you determine your sales mentorship goals:  

• Determine reps’ existing skill levels: Assess your sales reps' current skill levels. Do they need improvement in specific areas? Are there any skills that they are lacking? For most sales teams, sufficient knowledge of sales enablement tools is a priority. So whether they should learn how to create an invoice in Google Sheets or master using a CRM software, it’s important to identify all the areas where they could improve to deliver better results and better experiences for customers.
• Assess their development needs: Once you know where your team is now, where do you want them to be in X amount of time? What can you, their managers, and sales mentors do to get them there? This is where you would conduct a skills gap analysis to help you understand your next steps.
• Align their development with their interests: To close those skill gaps, align their development with their own short and long term career goals and professional interests. If sales reps are actually interested in the subject matter, they’re far more likely to be engaged participants of your sales mentorship program.
• Align development plans with organizational goals: Understanding how individual goals feed into your sales mentoring goals and then into the broader organizational goals is a key next step. When designing a mentorship program, align the organization's goals with your sales reps' development plans.

2. Decide on a model for the mentoring program

There are several different types of mentoring programs, each with its advantages and best use cases. Choose a model that best suits the goals that you determined in the previous step. Here are five mentoring models to consider for sales mentoring programs:

• Traditional 1-on-1: Pair a junior rep with a more experienced employee to act as the sales mentor. The primary aim of traditional one on one mentoring is to directly assist the mentee in honing specific skills and keep them accountable to their goals.
• Group mentoring: The mentor takes on several salespeople as mentees concurrently and coaches them together. It often involves more than one mentee or mentor. The primary aim of group mentoring is to provide support and advice to the mentees with a more collaborative approach rather than focus on individuals.
• Peer mentoring: Peer mentoring is where two sales reps at similar seniority levels teach and help one another build new skills or develop existing ones. One of the main benefits of this model is the informality of the relationship, allowing for more relaxed relationship building and problem solving.
• Reverse mentoring: A junior salesperson mentors a more experienced salesperson on the latest technologies, industry trends, and updated best practices. Reverse mentoring gives the senior sales rep a new stance on how things should be done. It also helps close the generational gap in views and understanding.
• Virtual mentoring: Virtual mentoring is where mentors and mentees meet online rather than physically. They schedule virtual meetings, exchange emails or instant messages, and mentors provide online resources to mentees.  

3. Pair mentors and mentees

There’s a lot hinging on the pairing stage of your sales mentor program. The success of each individual and the program as a whole depends on how well you understand the needs, objectives, strengths, and weaknesses of your participants.

Understanding how to match mentors and mentees can seem overwhelming, so let’s break it down into more manageable parts.

• Match mentee interests with a mentor’s strengths and skill sets.
• Match mentees with mentors that have the mentee’s desired experience or career path.
• Look for mentors and mentees with similar communication and learning styles for a smoother relationship.
• Find common ground through career, education, or personal backgrounds.

All of these similarities make it easier for both parties to connect more deeply.

💡Learn more about the power of a great mentor match.

4. Support sales mentoring session agendas

It’s challenging to start a mentoring relationship from scratch. Make sure to provide the sales mentor and their mentee with resources like articles, lectures, discussion topics, activity templates, and sample questions. 

Knowing where to start can help sales mentors and mentees create a mentor meeting agenda for each session, ensuring they’re making the most out of their time together.

5. Schedule progress check-ins

Administrators should aim to connect with participants at the beginning, end, AND throughout the duration of the program. Your responsibilities as program administrator don’t end at program launch. Once the program is underway, it’s now time for you to observe, assess, adjust, and offer assistance if needed.

A typical sales mentorship program runs for six months to a year. During that time, mentorship program admins should do the following:

• Get feedback on the program. From time to time, the program manager should encourage mentees and mentors to provide constructive feedback on how the program has helped them and what to improve upon.
• Solve issues that come up with pairings. The program manager's job is to help the participants sort out issues when they arise. The issue could be that the sales mentor isn’t a great fit, which would call for a quick rematching.
• Course-correct if needed. Based on feedback from participants, leadership, and other stakeholders, you may need to adjust aspects of the program, such as suggested subject matter, available resources, progress measurement, etc.

6. Measure success

Monitoring and evaluating your sales mentorship program is one key thing to figure out before launching your program and continuously evaluated throughout the duration. So what should you report on? Here are a few ways you can measure program performance:

• Signups: Signups indicate interest in the program and can help you determine how to better promote your program.
• Mentee and mentor goal progression: Mentees and mentors need to discuss beforehand and agree on what they intend to achieve with the relationship. This is usually done through a written document—a mentoring agreement—clearly stating all their expectations. Performing skills and scenario assessments before, during, and after the mentorship cycle can help. 
• Anecdotal feedback: The success of the program should not only be measured using numbers. Both the mentor’s and mentee's anecdotal feedback is essential in judging the progress and effectiveness of the program and the pairing itself. Ask about meeting frequency and length, preparation of both parties, value of the program, perceptions of progress, etc. 
• Session feedback: This metric should be used in measuring the effectiveness of each mentoring session. After every meeting, both parties should rate the session using a rating scale. This gives you insight into ongoing mentoring relationships and progression.
• Business outcomes: It would help if you could track the progress of the business outcomes achieved by both parties—such as increase in closed deals, negotiation success, etc. This will help determine how the mentees, the sales team, and the company is benefitting from the sales mentoring program.

Take the heavy lifting out of planning and launching your sales mentor program

Sales mentoring is standard practice in many large organizations for a reason: it works. Mentorship has long been used to train sales professionals, develop leaders, and equip new employees for long and successful careers.

Creating a successful program can seem daunting, but with the right support, resources, and tools, you can have your program up and running in no time. Together’s suite of mentorship tools as well as our library of mentoring content is here to support you through the creation and execution of your sales mentorship program.

Book a demo of Together’s mentorship platform to get started!