Having a Sales Mentor

This weekend was my 28th wedding anniversary. Several months ago I planned a romantic trip to New Orleans to celebrate. A few days before our departure my youngest daughter who just graduated from college came to us and said that she had a possible job offer in New Orleans and had set up her final interview during the time my wife and I were going to be in New Orleans. So guess what, she joined us for our romantic weekend. I have to admit, I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I was happy to be able to spend the extra time with my daughter but so much for romance.

As it turned out some really good things came out of this trip. First, we decided to stop in Mobile, Alabama and spend a night with a very good friend who just happens to have been my sales mentor. I met Jerry over 27 years ago and at that time he was one of the top sales people in the company I was working for. He is the best relationship sales person I have ever met and a true southern gentleman. In fact many times I have heard people say that when you look up southern gentleman in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Jerry. We had a great reunion and talked for several hours about business and sales in general. Jerry had a lot of good ideas about how to improve the market presence of Salesnet. This alone was worth the trip.

Second, visiting with Jerry got me to thinking about the importance of the sales relationship and how that has changed in the last 10 years. While people might say that today the relationship is not as important as it use to be, I would say that people still buy from people. I would agree that it is harder to develop the relationship. For one thing, more and more sales are done over the phone. In the Salesnet business almost all of our sales are done via the phone. In fact even the demos, projects, and training are normally done via web meetings. With this in mind, the challenge is to develop the relationship without ever meeting the customer face to face.

While all the things you do to develop a relationship still apply, except of course for the hand shaking and body language stuff, they are just harder to accomplish. This means that everything you do over the phone and off the phone in preparing for your meeting becomes much more important. Strategy, tactics, persistence, punctuality, honesty, attention to detail and all the other stuff are exponentially more important.

It's definitely something to consider when you are developing your sales strategy. Send your sales mentor stories to blog@salesnet.com and you could be featured in the next Salesnet CRM blog post!

While there is much more about this trip that I want to talk about it will have to wait until next week.

Good Selling.