Finding a Sales Mentor: There's a New & Non-Awkward Way
If you’re reading this blog post, chances are you’re not 100% confident in your sales efforts.
- Maybe you’re looking for sales advice to help you crush your sales quotas
- Maybe you’re a technical founder who’s never done sales before
Whatever your situation, you’ve all got one thing in common.
You know you can do better.
My sales mentorship story
Not that many people know this about me, but in 2008 when I started working for EuroVPS, my first function wasn’t marketing.
It was sales. And I was terrible at it.
It was only after a 60 minute mentorship session from my older brother (and founder) that I learned that the best way to sell is to not sell at all.
Help people solve their problems instead.
To prove a point, he called about a dozen customers that were using more than 80% of their memory on their VPS.
Instead of selling them a RAM upgrade, he educated them on how switching from Apache to NGiNX webserver could reduce their memory usage without having to spend money.
Most of them decided to upgrade their RAM because it was a lot easier than switching to NGiNX webserver.
That simple lesson was the seed that ultimately germinated into the creation of GrowthMentor.
And that’s the magic of mentorship.
It’s a catalyst for serendipity.
Old way to find a sales mentor
If you’re lucky like I was, your mentor can be your boss. In my case, he was also my brother, so reaching out wasn’t too hard. But if your boss isn’t “mentor material” you’ll have to step outside the confines of your organization to find a sales mentor. Easier said than done.
Here’s the traditional way to find a sales mentor:
- Do your homework, find someone you admire that’s got a verifiable track record of success in sales.
- Give first, do something nice to catch their attention and win their respect. It could even be as simple as an email giving them props for a podcast they were on, or a blog post they wrote.
- After rapport’s been built, let them know that you’re struggling with a specific challenge in your sales role, and would appreciate their opinion.
- Once they answer, try and build a genuine relationship and rapport. The mentorship will flow naturally.
While this sounds great in theory, it’s time-consuming and kind of awkward.
New way to find a sales mentor
- Signup to GrowthMentor
- Filter sales mentors
- Book a call with them
Here’s a video showing how to book a call with a growth mentor.
Featured Sales Mentors
Below are just a few sales mentors on the GrowthMentor platform with extensive hands-on sales experience.
Daniil Kopilevych
Daniil’s performed hundreds of outbound campaigns to close dozens of $10K+ deals.
He can help you:
- Choose the optimal target audience
- Get your target audience’s data quickly
- Create the best message
- Advise on outreach software to use
Alain Buffing
Alain Buffing is a world adventurer (115+ countries and counting) founder of TheTemple.shop, sports enthusiast, certified Tea ceremony master, and B2B sales-builder. Through his work with Salesforce, HubSpot, Fuze, various start ups, and Rocket Internet, he’s seen firsthand how technology shapes the future of business.
After having several mentors in his life this is his first experience being on the other side of the table. For those who are looking for something out of the ordinary, book a call with Alain to discuss topics like; target accounts, cloud computing, or consultancy advice, high impact growth and scaling advice.
Jordan Crawford
Jordan Crawford is a fellow on OnDeck and ran growth for Zinc.com and moved them from 1 to 100M in GMV and has just completed an automated cold email system for MainStreet.com (500M valuation). He advises Commsor and Bouncer (YC) and is building a startup to take his experience in cold email and use it to help home services companies drive leads.
Zsuzsanna Ferenczi
Working together Zsuzsanna can help/guide/challenge you in the following areas:
- Marketing/Sales alignment
- Marketing mix
- Customer journey
- Data: overall data architecture, data collection, analysis and retargeting
- Business development, hunting and telemarketing – processes, enablement, campaign execution
- ROI analysis – and ongoing governance
Gavin Tye
Gavin is a lead and sales strategist that is passionate about helping businesses develop their unique sales approach that highlights their strengths over the existing competition. During the last 8 years in startup software sales, he has discovered a unique sales strategy that has helped him reduce the length of sales by upwards of 75% while increasing our revenue from each client.
Want to browse more sales mentors?
Use the filters on our browse mentors page to filter mentors based on their expertise. There are dozens of vetted sales mentors on GrowthMentor. With our membership, you’ll get exclusive access to book calls with the mentors. Over 65% of the mentors on GrowthMentor are offering pro bono sales mentorship calls for members only.
Why talk to a sales mentor?
- You’re filling up with low-quality leads and want help on how to boost the quality
- You don’t have a proper process or guideline for your lead generation efforts
- You’re not sure which sales CRM or lead generation SaaS tools you should use
- You’re nervous about how GDPR compliant your sales process is and want a second opinion
- You’re having difficulties tracking KPIs across your full-funnel
- You simply aren’t getting enough leads and it’s something you want to fix
Ready to get started?
There’s no easier way to find a sales mentor in the tech sector.
Don’t go about it alone.
Learn from (and be inspired by) those that have “been there and done that.”
