Why you Should Implement a Mentorship Program in your Sales Team?

According to a CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness Survey, mentorship substantially impacts an employee’s career and long-term success across several measures. The same survey also revealed that 90% of employees with a career mentor say they’re happy with their job. Studies also show that employees who receive a mentorship program are more likely to get promotions and salary raise at higher rates than those employees receiving no mentorship. 

There is more to a mentorship program than making your employees feel valued and happy. In this article, we’ll make you understand why starting a mentoring program should be your priority to ensure the growth opportunities and the personal and professional development for both the mentors and mentees in your sales team. But before that, let’s first look at what the mentorship program itself is about.

What is A Mentoring Program For Sales Organizations?

A mentoring program is an initiative that allows salespeople to learn from one another. In the workplace, this usually involves any program that pairs salespeople with established career success (mentors) with another salesperson with less experience (mentees) for career guidance and exchange of knowledge and insights. This mentoring pairing is usually between veteran sales reps (or senior sales professionals) and newly recruited or junior sales reps in a sales team.

When it comes to the type of mentoring program, they are mainly three. They include

1. Traditional one-on-one mentoring – this mentoring program involves matching a mentor with a mentee. The program’s progress, structure, and timeframe are planned and established by the two parties. 
2. Distance mentoring – This is a mentoring program that takes place entirely online. It involves leveraging the relevant mentoring platform and mentoring software for learning and development through a mentorship program.
3. Group mentoring – this is the mentoring program where a single mentor provides career guidance and support for many mentees at a time. This could be done either physically, remotely, or both.

What is the Purpose of Mentoring?

The main reason behind starting a mentoring or mentorship program in the work environment is to make work better for all employees in your sales team. For a sales organization, a mentoring program is meant to accelerate new hires’ development, increase their knowledge base, and help them build professional skills for future milestones.

New salespeople, veteran sales reps, and even the company itself can benefit from a mentorship program. A mentor (usually a tenured salesperson) helps guide the mentees (especially younger salespeople) by providing timely feedback, advice, and prospective opportunities for professional growth and promotion. Mentoring helps groom veteran sales reps for leadership roles.

Quality Mentors, too, can benefit from a mentorship program because ‘mentoring’ someone would help the mentors keep their leadership knowledge and skill as sharp as possible. While for the sales organization implementing a formal mentoring program it’s an avenue to increase employee retention rates as employees with someone they consider a role model or mentor at the workplace are less likely to quit their job.

What are the Benefits of a Mentorship Program in the Work Environment?

The following are a few benefits of a formalized sales mentorship program:

#1. Mentoring helps develop the knowledge and skills of salespeople

Implementing a mentoring program is an effective way of investing in the growth and development of your sales team as a whole. Putting a mentorship program in place helps provide a conducive avenue for senior and junior/new sales reps to grow collectively. This way, tenured sales reps can give back to their junior colleagues what they’ve learned while on the job through sales training and interaction. 

Programs like these encourage the regular flow of knowledge, skills, and experience between senior reps (mentors) and junior reps (mentees). As a result, junior sales members hone their sales skills and knowledge while the veteran reps can keep their skills even sharper for leadership roles.

#2. Mentoring is a great way to promote overall employee engagement

Programs like these can help make your onboarding process better. When new entrance into your organization knows that there is someone in your team they can go to for guidance and support, they tend to feel more welcome, which helps accelerate their adaptation and career goals. Mentorship programs make recent hires find their new workplace warming and their new roles more meaningful. 

On the other hand, mentors tend to gain more respect, recognition, and self-esteem from their colleagues because they have the chance to impart their knowledge and expertise to mentees. In turn, all parties become happy with their job, which helps increase engagement in all ramifications. 

For sales organizations, engagement translates into productivity. The more engaged your salespeople are, the more productive they are.

#3. Mentorship could raise the spirit of your salespeople

The challenges associated with selling (especially when it comes to prospecting) are not something to leave exclusively for new hires or junior sales reps to handle. When new hires do not meet expectations and keep getting rejections from prospects, they tend to become demoralized. 

However, having someone who has been through a similar scenario to guide underperformed sales reps can help them feel much better again. This will also allow them to learn what needs to be done to salvage the sales professionals they take as mentors. When salespeople see their efforts materializing into something great again, their morale improves, and they develop more confidence in themselves.

Conclusion

Most salespeople these days assume that attractive pay and recognition by their colleagues are perhaps the two key factors determining overall happiness and productivity at work. With this in mind, a mentorship program will be a great way to make your employees feel valued (to ensure they’re not undervalued) and satisfied with their current job in your organization to ensure their overall happiness and wellbeing. Programs like these can also help set up new hires for professional development and promotion to ensure they’re not underpaid.

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