Why Mentoring is Essential for Sales Leaders

In a job market where sales turnover is higher than ever, sales leaders are struggling to find and retain productive talent.

This issue is driven by a lack of ownership of the onboarding process and supporting new sellers, ultimately increasing the likelihood of employee churn. The process may be managed by a sales leader or an HR specialist who would take this on as an additional responsibility, instead of as an essential part of recruitment. This can leave new sellers feeling under-equipped and undervalued in their roles.

Michael Smith, a Managing Director from Blue Ridge Partners, puts this growing issue into numbers when he says; “We’ve seen companies lose 80% of their talent following an acquisition. Fast-growing businesses in attractive and growing markets are unable to keep pace with that growth almost entirely due to their inability to attract and retain sales talent. In Silicon Valley, it’s not unusual for firms to lose 25% or more of their sellers every quarter.”

Tackling employee churn in sales is vital for building high-performing and productive sales teams. The good news? Sales mentoring has the power to transform your teams.

📖 Find out more about the importance of mentoring in the workplace in our guide 📖

Attracting and retaining top sales talent

When firms lose a large number of their sellers, there is a direct negative impact on their business activity – including revenue, costs, and margins.

Research by Blue Ridge Partners indicates that “A five percent increase in sales rep attrition across your sales team can increase selling costs 4-6% and reduce total revenue attainment by 2-3% overall”. Not to mention the difficulty of fostering long-term relationships between short-term sellers and customers and motivating your sales team throughout.

Therefore, it’s in your company’s best interest to develop its talent. If you can do so successfully, the results are two-fold. Not only will the seller be less likely to look for a new job, but the entire company will see a boost in production.

A recent study by McKinsey & Company, which included more than 600,000 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes reveals that “High performers are 400 percent more productive than average ones”. So, the idea is simple: when you can recruit and develop sales members into high-performing employees, business performance increases.

📖 Find out more about why coaching and mentoring are essential for leadership in our guide 📖

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Reducing the turnover rate of your sales team

This is a lot easier said than done – and something that many senior executives do not have time to take on. Mckinsey & Company found that, “a whopping 82 percent of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people. For companies that do, only 7 percent think they can keep it”. There’s clearly a problem.

The great news is that companies don’t have to tackle this challenge alone. Internal mentoring software, such as Guider exists for these reasons. Here at Guider, we understand the difficulties faced by sales leaders – a lack of resources, dealing with poor employee experiences, and fluent communication in an age of hybrid working. To assist sales leaders, Guider provides one centralised innovative mentoring platform with everything you need to launch or scale impactful mentoring programs and prove ROI.

Providing sales mentors to your team tackles employee churn and speeds up time to competency for new hires. It’s a win-win all round. Whether you’re building out a new outbound sales team or developing the performance of your sales leaders, mentoring and coaching are essential.

Our platform can transform mentoring and coaching in your organisation. With uses across the recruitment, onboarding and team development process, mentoring software is a solution that effectively reduces employee churn.

With Guider’s mentoring platform you can:

        ✅ Offer an attractive benefit to new candidates

        ✅ Improve the efficacy of your onboarding process

        ✅ Develop and up-skill your sales team

        ✅ Offer greater opportunities for learning and growth

        ✅ Develop your teams networks across the business

Our mentoring software can be implemented virtually too, making it a great solution for hybrid and remote first companies.

Find out more about improving onboarding with mentoring in our guide

Internal mentoring software simplified

By working with us, your sales team will be set up for success. With out dedicated customer success and engagement teams on hand, we go the extra mile to get your people connected through sales mentoring. We take care of the groundwork by taking care of the following:

Build your mentoring program

Before going live, we build your mentoring platform with:

 ☑ Customised landing pages unique to your program

 ☑ Work with our expert team to create a recruitment and promotion plan

 ☑ Customise the Guider platform with your branding

 ☑ Customise sign-up forms

 ☑ SSO and user integrations

Find out more about the cost of not doing mentoring in our guide

Launch and match

Using our sophisticated matching algorithm with a 96.5% matching accuracy, we customise your mentor matching:

 ☑ Match within the same or different regions

 ☑ Match with different job level ranges

☑ Limit the amount of relationships mentors can have

Measure your success‍

‍Let Guider guarantee you hit your success criteria and help align mentoring to your overall business goals. Our real-time metrics give you access to:

☑ Live data dashboard

 ☑ Engagement metrics

 ☑ Skills Reports aligning with your program objectives

This is all essential for calculating the ROI of your program.

📖 Find out more about how mentoring software works in our guide 📖‍

Time and time again, mentoring has proven to boost retention rates for companies around the world. Frank Jules at AT&T understands the value of mentoring programs and describes its benefits when he says; “If you don’t invest in training and enabling your people, you wind up spending a significant chunk of resources dealing with rep churn, finding new reps, and ramping them. In the end, very few of them will develop into the top talent you need to outperform the competition.”

To avoid this common problem, give your team the edge by investing in mentoring for your sales team. By partnering with us, you can improve both business performance and retain long-term sales talent. The benefits of mentoring are remarkable why don’t you find out for yourself?

Want to find out more? Talk to us on the chat below about how we can transform your sales team through mentoring