Establishing A Sales Mentoring Program

January 1st, 2018

Nancy Maluso

Summary

The sales profession has used mentoring programs for generations, offering new hires the chance to learn by observing (or “shadowing”) experienced sales reps. These programs tend to follow an informal, ad hoc structure, producing inconsistent results. In their 2004 Harvard Business Review article ““Deep Smarts,”” Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap pointed out that when experienced workers leave a company, they take their years of knowledge and expertise (i.e., ““deep smarts””) with them. In this brief, we explain how to establish mentoring programs across a sales organization to allow it to maximize and also retain the value of the knowledge, skills, and experience of top sales talent.

Want to read the full report?

This report is available for individual purchase ($1495).

Forrester helps business and technology leaders use customer obsession to accelerate growth. That means empowering you to put the customer at the center of everything you do: your leadership strategy, and operations. Becoming a customer-obsessed organization requires change — it requires being bold. We give business and technology leaders the confidence to put bold into action, shaping and guiding how to navigate today's unprecedented change in order to succeed.