Finding Success with a Sales Mentor - Outside Sales Talk with Tim J.M. Rohrer

Tim J.M. Rohrer is an award-winning sales director with over 25 years of experience in sales and sales management. He dedicates himself to coaching and mentoring salespeople and sales leaders, as well as consulting and providing training to sales organizations. Tim is also the author of the book "Sales Lessons of the World’s Greatest Mentor: Secrets of a Sales Winner That Will Help You Become Wildly Successful in Sales."

In this episode, we delve into the importance of finding a good mentor in achieving success in sales.

Here are some of the topics covered in this episode:

• How finding a good mentor can help salespeople reach their goals
• Criteria for selecting a mentor who's a good fit
• The positive impact of mentors on career growth
• The role of goal setting in mentorship
• Leveraging online tools and networks to find mentors

More From the Guest:

Tim’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timjmrohrer/

Tim’s Website - https://timjmrohrer.com/

Tim’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Lessons-Worlds-Greatest-Mentor/dp/B0BRLT4HMY

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Transcript - Finding Success with a Sales Mentor - Outside Sales Talk with Tim J.M. Rohrer

The Role of Mentorship in Sales Success

Steve: This is Outside Sales Talk, the best podcast for outside salespeople. I'm your host, Steve Benson, and we're here to chat with the world's top sales experts so that you can get their best sales tactics to level up your game.

Steve: Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today, I've got Tim J.M. Rohrer here with me, and we're going to talk about finding success with a sales mentor. Tim, thanks for joining us today.

Tim: Thanks for having me on the show, Steve. It's great to be here.

Steve: Awesome. Well, just by way of introduction, Tim is an award-winning sales director with over 25 years of experience in sales and sales management.

Steve: He dedicates himself to coaching and mentoring salespeople and sales leaders, as well as consulting and providing training to sales organizations. He is the author of the book Sales Lessons of the World's Greatest Mentor: Secrets of a Sales Winner that will help you become wildly successful in sales. That's right. So I like it. Tim, let's jump into it.

Steve: For salespeople looking to achieve success, how can finding a good mentor help them reach their goals?

Tim: Well, think of a mentor as a coach and any great player still needs a great coach in order to maximize his talents and skills. A mentor can help a salesperson by just guiding them down the right path and giving them some wisdom once in a while.

Tim: Nudging them back towards the things that they know are going to work better for that person. And maybe every once in a while, taking them off to the side and saying, you're doing it wrong, you know.

Steve: Absolutely. We all need someone to tell us we're doing it wrong sometimes.

Tim: Every once in a while, yes.

Finding the Right Mentor

Steve: And how do you get there with someone? How do you, as a salesperson, go about finding a good mentor?

Tim: I think the first criteria you're looking for is somebody who has some experience and wisdom in your field.

Tim: That's got to be number one because you're going to be asking them questions about what's going on with your day to day. And if they're unfamiliar with what you do, I don't think that's going to be your best choice for a mentor. Once you've identified some of those people, then what you're really looking for is somebody with empathy, you know, empathetic skills and a person who is a good listener because I think the number one trait of a strong mentor is their ability to listen carefully to what is going on with you.

Steve: And how do you tell if someone's empathetic as a salesperson?

Tim: That can be tricky, but we've all had relationships with people where we get the feeling that the relationship is more about them than it is about you. That's a person who's really not the mentor you're looking for.

Tim: But so you see it, you recognize it when you see it. A person who believes that your goals and your aspirations supersede their own and that's how they act when they're around you. That's what you're really looking for. A person who supports you for the sake of supporting you, not because supporting you benefits them in any way whatsoever.

Steve: So we're looking for givers when we're looking for mentors.

Tim: We are. We're looking for givers. You know, we're looking for parents. We're looking for coaches. We're looking for that coach who in the post-game press conference says, I want to call out how great my players were today. If they lose, he wants to call out the fact that he wasn't quite up to the task. He let his players down. That's the person you're looking for.

Steve: Right. Yeah. Makes sense. And I guess you've written extensively and speak a lot about mentorship and mentors and how important they are. Was the origin story here that you had a fantastic mentor that had a really positive impact on your career or have you been a mentor many times or how did this kind of come about?

Tim: Yeah, the origin story of the book is that I had a mentor early on in my sales broadcast career. I was in radio advertising sales for a long time.

Tim: And when I first started, I ran into a fellow named Dick Harlow. He was my first general manager at my radio station. He was an empathetic listener. And I needed that because I was brand new to the business. I didn't know what I was doing, but I may have also been overconfident in my skills. I took a couple of really hard falls, and it was great that Dick was there to tell me that was okay, to keep on going forward.

Tim: And to maybe give me some advice about some of the missteps not to make again in the future. So yeah, I was just really lucky that I found a mentor at the beginning of my career. I think ideally that's when you really need a good mentor at the beginning.

Qualities of a Great Mentor

Steve: And I mean, I guess the most natural mentor is also your sales manager, who's by nature your coach, they're aligned with you. It's not just they're giving to you because they're giving, but it's also their job. How do you hire managers that are going to be great mentors?

Tim: Right. So I guess that's a very logical one. If you're leading an organization, how do you hire for managers that are going to be great mentors?

Tim: I think there are some interview questions you can ask. I'm a big fan of tests like DISC, D-I-S-C, these sorts of... I don't want to call them personality tests, they're more behavioral predictor tests. They can really give you an indication of what drives somebody's behaviors. And if you're looking for certain types of behaviors, you can really find them by giving these tests in advance to people. If you're purposely trying to hire a sales manager...

Tim: I do think you want to try to hire somebody who's going to be a good coach. Not everybody is going to sync with everybody on the team. You know, there's going to be some of those relationships that are not perfect, but for the most part, if you have a choice when you hire a sales manager, I think you should be hiring somebody with coaching skills.

Steve: And what makes someone a great coach or a great mentor? Like you talked about yours, you know, noticing when you stumbled and pointing out, you know, having the expertise and ability to point out what you were doing, what you could do better. What do you think makes someone able to do that? Is it experience? Is it expertise? Is it a curious mind?

Tim: What makes them great? What makes someone great at being a mentor? I think that what they all have in common is that they have the long view in mind. Right? So everybody wants to make their month or make their quarter. But I think the really great managers, the ones who are terrific mentors, they see it as a long game where you want to make the year or you want to set somebody up for success in their career, you know, or ideally, you want somebody to be successful at life and work is just a part of that.

Tim: If you find somebody with that sort of mentality, right, and the skill to look beyond the day to day, then I think you've really got something special.

Learning from Experience: The Kayak Lesson

Steve: And in your book, one of the most valuable lessons, I think, that your mentor gave you was he showed you how to, what you say, "write your own kayak." Can you tell us about that lesson and how that went down?

Tim: So I got off to a pretty good start early on. You know, I got a couple of really nice wins and I was on a high and then I hit what I think may have been a sophomore slump. All of a sudden, you know, people were not buying from me.

Tim: It was going poorly. So I reached out to Dick and I said, "Hey, I really need you." I left him a voicemail, I didn't get a return phone call. I dropped by his office and he was on the phone and he just wasn't as available to me as he had been. I was getting quite a bit irritated with Dick to tell you the truth. You know, I was like, "I need you right now."

Tim: And I ran into him on the stairs leading up to the office. He was coming down with another sales rep and I was going up. He says, "Hey, Timmy, I know you've been trying to get a hold of me." And Dick was only the second adult male that ever called me Timmy, by the way. The first was my father. For whatever reason, I didn't mind it so much with Dick. So he's like, "Timmy, I know you've been trying to get a hold of me, but you know, I've been super busy and I'm sorry, I'm just not as available as I have been."

Tim: And I said, "Well, that's just not great, Dick. Frankly, I'm having a hard time here." I was being quite insolent frankly, and you know, I would not have been surprised if Dick had lost his temper with me, but he didn't. He said, "Listen, I'm the general manager of the whole radio station. I've got a promotions department, I've got a programming department, I've got a sales department. I've got 20, 25 people who need my time just like you need my time. So I'm not always going to be available for you and that's just something you're going to have to understand."

Tim: He said, "Hey, did you watch the Olympics this summer?" This was in 1992. So the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. I said, "Yeah, yeah, I saw the Olympics. That's amazing." He said, "No, I want to talk about the kayakers. They build this manmade river out of concrete with these giant boulders, and then they rush hundreds of thousands of gallons of water down this chute, and they create all these rapids."

Tim: "And then these kayakers get in there with these little boats and they've got to somehow go around the boulders. They set up these flags. They suspend the flags over the top of the course. They have to go around the flags. They go downstream, and then they turn around, go back upstream."

Tim: He says, "It's incredible because every once in a while, what happens is a kayaker flips upside down and now they're racing downstream, probably banging their heads against boulders. You know for certain that somebody is going to die in this competition. But there's nothing anybody can do because they're on the sidelines next to this raging river. Nobody can dive in, that's not going to work. So while you're watching, certain that you're witnessing a tragedy, the kayaker flips himself upright, goes back upstream, goes around the flag he missed, and then keeps going down the course."

Tim: He said, "That's what salespeople have to do. You're going to run into rough water, you're going to flip your kayak upside down, and there are going to be times when you feel like you're drowning. Nobody will be there to help you, including me. You have to learn how to right your own kayak and get back on course."

Tim: With that, he jumped into the car with Tommy Glover and went out to make sales calls with him.

Steve: Well, I was like, "I'll try not to drown." Right. "Thanks, Dick." I was not ready to hear that lesson, but the fact is, I needed that one.

Tim: Right. Because I was spending way too much time relying on Dick and Dick's advice and Dick's wisdom. Dick, of course, still wanted to be there for me, but he wanted to be there less for me than he was at the very beginning.

Tim: That's also something you'll notice with a good coach. They spend a lot of time with you in the beginning, and then they want you to do some of the things they taught you on your own and demonstrate that you've learned and can handle it.

Steve: Writing your own kayak is a critical sales skill. Makes sense to me.

The Importance of Timeliness in Sales

Steve: Another thing you talked about was the hard sales truth that time kills deals. Talk about how you learned that and how sellers can keep things moving fast to stop time from killing their deals.

Tim: Yeah, boy. I mean, that is the truth. I was out prospecting. So back in the day in radio advertising sales, we would leave the radio station in the morning, see our existing customers, and then prospect around those existing customers, like what a lot of field salespeople are still doing today.

Tim: So I was out there prospecting and I popped into a Sherwin Williams paint store. There was a guy up on a ladder stocking paint, and I looked around and there was nobody else in the store. So I figured that he was the owner. He calls from the ladder, "Hey, how can I help you?" I said, "I love your store." He says, "Thanks so much." He comes down off the ladder, introduces himself as Bill. I said, "Bill, my name is Tim. I'm with Magic 96 Radio."

Tim: "I'm out talking to some of my customers and also prospecting for new ones. We help small businesses like yours in Charlotte grow their business through effective radio advertising. Do you have a few minutes to talk about that?" Back in 1992, people actually did have time to talk about that. I know, it's like, good luck with that approach today, right? In 2023, you need to know everything there is to know about somebody's business before you walk in.

Tim: But 30 years ago, people were open to educating you about their business because this was pre-Google. So I talked to the guy for a while about radio advertising. I talked about some of the people I'd been helping in his area. He says, "You know what? Work me up something for $2,500." I was like, "Great. I can build you an effective advertising schedule for $2,500. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back to the radio station, get all the big brains at the station together."

Tim: "We're going to talk about your store, all the things I learned today. We're going to come up with some great messaging ideas. I'm going to put together a really terrific advertising schedule. I'm going to come back out here, say two or three days from now, and tell you all about it and sign you up." He's like, "That's great. I'll see you on Friday." I said, "Perfect," because that was Tuesday.

Tim: The next day, I had not gathered any of the big brains together at the radio station because this was a $2,500 advertising schedule. I did these all the time. So I put together a really simple schedule for the guy and a couple of ideas for messages. Then I was just waiting around for Friday to happen.

Tim: Dick came by the sales bullpen on Wednesday, asked me what I was up to. I told him I was getting ready to head out to see a couple of my clients and do some more prospecting, but that I had this great meeting set up with Sherwin Williams. He said, "Well, when is it?" I said, "It's Friday."

Tim: He said, "Hmm." I didn't know what I was supposed to be reading into that "hmm." Dick didn't elaborate. He was heading off to the programming department to talk to them about something. So he disappears, I go about my business.

Tim: On Friday, I go back to the Sherwin Williams store, and as before, I walk in and Bill comes out the back door, out of the back office, wiping his hands. I guess he'd been mixing paint or doing something that paint store people do. He's looking over my shoulder like this. I was like, "Wow, it looks like he's looking for somebody better than me."

Tim: I say, "Hey Bill, it's Tim with Magic 96. You remember we talked about an advertising schedule. I'm here to show it to you and get you all signed up." He says, "Tim, geez. You know, the day after you left, my hot water heater broke, and I was hoping you were the plumber because he's supposed to be coming in today to fix this thing."

Tim: "That $2,500 I was going to spend with you, I've got to spend to fix this hot water heater. There's just no way around it." I was like, "Well, that is unfortunate, but let's just go ahead and schedule you for next month." He said, "I don't know. Let's just put a pin in it for now. We can revisit it at a later time. I'm just really concerned about this hot water heater and how much it's going to cost me."

Tim: I was devastated, blown away by how this turn of events happened. I get back to the station, five o'clock rolls around, and Dick comes back from whatever he was doing and comes by my desk. He could see I was looking down, asked me if I drank some milk that had expired or something. I said, "No, that Sherwin Williams deal blew up." He said, "Why?"

Tim: I told him, and he said, "Timmy, time kills deals. You should have closed that thing up on Tuesday when he said he was ready to buy." I said, "But Dick, how am I going to do that? You told us every deal is customized. We don't sell packages, right? So I couldn't whip out the package of the day. I told the guy we customize all our solutions, and I get the big brains together."

Tim: He said, "Yeah, yeah. But sometimes you need to give the illusion of customization for these smaller customers." I said, "The illusion of customization?" He said, "Yeah."

Tim: He said, "A $2,500 customer is a modest size customer. Now, if somebody said to you, if you were talking to the Chevrolet dealer and he says he wants to spend $20,000 a month for the next year, now you're going to need a promotion, you're going to need on-air giveaways, you're going to need remote broadcasts at his location, you're going to need seven or eight or ten different messages over the course of the year. Now you need all the big brains at the station."

Tim: "But a local guy who's got $2,500 to spend, you know what a $2,500 schedule looks like. Here's what you do next time. Go ahead and put into your briefcase a template for a $1,000 schedule, a $2,500 schedule, and a $5,000 schedule. Almost all the people you call on are going to be in one of those categories or right around there."

Tim: "Then when somebody says, 'Hey, work me up something for $2,500,' you say to them, 'All our plans are customized because we want to make sure that it's exactly right for you. But I was just working on a $2,500 plan for a guy down the street, and I can't tell you who it is because of privacy reasons, but I do have a schedule here and we can take a look at it.' Then you pull out your $2,500 template, the name is redacted across the top."

Tim: "You say, 'For $2,500, this is about what you could expect to get on our air.' Then you sit down with the person, explain these are the morning spots and the midday spots, and then you can talk about your station. If he thinks for whatever reason he should have more afternoon than morning, you can cross out, add, and move some things around. In the end, you've got something he likes, he signs it, you promise to bring back a more formal agreement later after you've entered it into your system at the station."

Tim: "But now you've got an agreement, and you've got the next steps. The next steps in this case were write the commercial and bring back some sample sound."

Tim: Dick said, "Yeah, you just have to be smart about the amount of time that elapses between somebody saying yes and you getting them to sign the deal. You never know when the water heater is going to blow."

Tim: It's an important lesson for all of us. I told Dick, "That was just bad luck." He said, "No, no, no. That was predictable. Because one day it's a hot water heater, the next day, their wife had an accident and now they have to take three days off work, or some other thing happens, or they're at a cocktail party and somebody says radio advertising doesn't work, and they get cold feet. There's always something."

Tim: "This time it was a hot water heater, but it's always something and it's predictable."

Emotional Drivers in Sales

Steve: Makes sense. Well, related to that, I mean, in your book, you mentioned that customers buy for emotional reasons, right? So how can a seller delve into those emotions and leverage that to win more sales?

Tim: I like to call these emotional instigators. People do buy for emotional reasons, and then they try to justify it logically. "I had to buy that Porsche because it's a good investment," or "I had to pay $90,000 for that Volvo because it's the safest car on the road."

Tim: You bought it because that's what moved you, you loved it, you really liked it. But then later on, you tell people that there was a logical reason why you had to do it.

Tim: As sellers, we want to create emotional instigators. We want to paint a picture of an optimistic future so people can feel it, they can buy into it. For example, if you call on restaurants, you might say something like, "Hey, how would it feel if your restaurant was full every single Friday and Saturday night?"

Tim: Somebody who owns a restaurant would be like, "Man, could you imagine? All my waiters and waitresses would be happy. The guys in the kitchen would be thrilled because we would just be cranking out stuff. It'd be so much easier to order food and inventory because we know how much we were using. We could keep it fresh. And then you'd have that buzz in the restaurant that you get when people are there and it's fun and engaging."

Tim: They're convincing themselves that whatever it is you're selling is going to allow them to enjoy that optimistic future. They want to have that. So salespeople need to come up with emotional instigators.

Tim: I take golf lessons, for example, and I tell the guys at GolfTech, "You need to ask questions that stir up the emotions of your potential students." They're like, "Well, like what?" And I'm like, "Well, how great would it feel if you were to get out of a bunker in one shot every single time?" Well, if you're a golfer, that's like, "Yes! I can't even tell you the number of times that I hit a sand shot and it rolls back down to my feet, right?"

Tim: You want to break your clubs and throw them in a lake or something. So if you can paint this picture that, "No, no, no, that doesn't have to happen. You can get out of a bunker in one shot every time, I can teach you."

Tim: The students will pay any kind of money to do that. Or like, "How great would it feel to never three-putt again?" That would be amazing, right? "What would it be like if you could play the entire round with just one ball?" That's possible. People do that.

Tim: These are the sort of emotional instigators you want to be asking so people can start to envision, "What might that be like? Could I have that future?" And yeah, you could have that future if you do this next step, which is to buy something from me, a service or a product.

The Role of Mentorship in Goal Setting

Steve: What role does goal-setting play in all this? And just in general, how does a mentor help you as a salesperson set your goals?

Tim: The thing about a mentor that people have to be aware of is that the mentor doesn't set the goals, right? The student, the mentee, sets the goals. What is it that you want to achieve?

Tim: So a good mentor will be asking questions like, "Hey, what is it you're trying to do? What is it you're trying to achieve? How do you see yourself in the future? What is it that you want?"

Tim: When a person is able to quantify or explain or paint a picture of what they want, then the coach will say, "How then, how are you going to do that?" Ultimately, the mentee is going to have to set up a series of goals in order to accomplish this future that they've envisioned for themselves and that they've been able to explain to their mentor.

Tim: What the mentor does is hold you accountable, right? They don't set the goals. They hold you accountable.

Steve: And how do they hold you accountable? What is the... I mean, I know how a sales manager holds you accountable. But in this type of relationship, assuming it's not your manager, how does that accountability play out?

Tim: Well, they ask you questions. For example, if I'm a basketball player and I say, "I want to get better at shooting free throws," my mentor, my coach would say, "Okay, well, how would you go about doing that?"

Tim: I said, "Well, one thing I could do, I guess, is at the end of practice, I could shoot a hundred free throws and keep track of how many I made. Over the course of time, I'll see whether or not I'm improving." "Okay. And when are you going to start doing that?" "I'm going to start doing that today." "Okay. So today after practice, I'll see you shooting a hundred free throws?" "Yes."

Tim: At the end of practice, I just leave, right? I don't do the hundred free throws. So the next day, my mentor would say, "Hey, I remember you told me your goal was to get better at free throws, and you also said that your plan was to shoot 100 free throws after practice every day. But yesterday I noticed you didn't shoot any free throws after practice. Did your goal change?"

Tim: That's how they hold a mentee accountable. They ask you, "I noticed that your behavior doesn't match the goal or the outcome that you're seeking. Did your goal change?" That's a punch in the gut. "No, no, no, no, no. I'm still a hundred percent committed to getting better at free throws."

Tim: "Okay. Did you come up with a different way to get better at free throws besides taking 100 free throws at the end of practice every day? Are you coming in early? Maybe I didn't see you. Are you coming in before practice? Are you shooting free throws at home? Are you watching videos about shooting free throws? What are you doing?" "I haven't done any of those things."

Tim: "Okay. If you don't do any of those things, then I'm going to have to start questioning whether or not you really want to get better at free throws."

Tim: It's the same for anything, right? Any goal you have. You have to have a plan of action, and then your coach or mentor will ask you questions about whether or not you're following your plan.

Establishing Accountability & Cadence in Mentorship

Steve: What kind of cadence do you recommend a salesperson set up with their mentorship relationship? I know sales managers, a lot of them are of the opinion that you interact with your reps every day, or certainly have one formal call a week or meeting a week face-to-face where you can interact and talk about whether, how things are going, and in the pipeline, and how all the deals are playing out. The classic cadence call. For this type of mentorship relationship, how often do you think, what's the frequency you should be interacting?

Tim: I think in the beginning, it's weekly, and then over time, it becomes less frequent.

Tim: I always imagine how frequently you would meet with somebody if you were trying to teach them to ice skate. In the beginning of teaching somebody to ice skate, they're going to fall a lot and get hurt. They're going to need you to be on the ice with them. You're going to be wearing ice skates too if you're the coach, right?

Tim: You may even be holding somebody's hand or giving them some additional aids that help them skate. They've got these walker things now, I don't know if you've seen them. You hold them in front of you, and you skate with them for a while.

Steve: I'm from the Midwest, so we're born knowing how to ice skate. We don't have a... if you can walk, you can skate. There's no walker things.

Tim: There's no walker things. So it's a lot of hand-holding in the beginning if you're trying to teach somebody to ice skate, right? Unless you're from the Midwest or from Canada, I suppose. But then as time goes along, they're going fast. You can't keep up with them, and you're not holding any hands.

Tim: What I noticed about Olympic skaters is the coaches are now outside the ice, right? They're just watching the person skate. Then the person who's skating comes over, and the coach says a few things, and then they go back out and do some more skating, and then they come over. It's sort of like that.

Tim: But way less frequently than an ice-skating coach. So for me, a mentor relationship is, in the beginning, once a week. If it's your sales manager, you can't be talking about other stuff. So when I mentor people who are on my sales team, I set aside a time when we talk about just them and just their goals, and not anything that's on my agenda. It's just about their agenda, and it's a separate meeting. It's a mentorship-only meeting.

Tim: But mostly, I don't mentor people on my own team because it's much easier to have that relationship where you're not talking about the day-to-day if that person's not part of your team. They have a different manager. So that's probably a better bet. But frequently in the beginning, less frequently over time.

Tim: Then the question is, well, how long should you have this mentor relationship with somebody? I say forever. I just went to see my mentor. I just went out to North Carolina and met with Dick. We played some golf, had some laughs, talked about some business, and it was great. Thirty years later, we're still doing it.

Building Lifelong Relationships

Steve: That's fantastic. Relationships are vital for sales success. It's vital to build those lifelong relationships. I think it's one of the most fun parts of business, to have those types of ongoing interactions, like the business relationships.

Tim: I agree. You want to get a doctor just a few years older than you or about your age that you can grow old together with. A lot of these life relationships, if you play your cards right, you really get to do them over the long term.

Steve: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, Dick is 10 years older than me, and I think that's a good number, right? I'm 10 years older than a person I've been mentoring for the last 25 years. It gives you the opportunity for longevity, as you were saying.

Tim: If you pick somebody who's 30 years older than you, they're probably not going to be interested for the long haul, and you're going to have to find another mentor eventually.

The Dynamics of Being a Mentor and Mentee

Steve: Absolutely. Are there different things that you've learned from being a mentor versus being a mentee?

Tim: Yeah, for sure. It's not as easy as some people make it look. That's one of the things I learned. I've got to bite my tongue all the time because I want to tell people what to do.

Tim: That's not what a mentor relationship is. A mentor relationship is trying to get people to discover what they should be doing. You've got to ask a lot of questions.

Tim: In my career, I would prefer to give directives, but that's not what people need from a mentor. So I've had to pull myself back from explaining exactly what they should be doing next, and instead going about it saying, "Well, what do you think you should be doing next?"

Steve: Makes sense. I've spread myself a little thin in my mentoring, and I used to be better at it than I am today, but I've probably had 500 employees over the years. 10, 12 years ago, even 15 years ago, I was a much better mentor than I am today. I've almost given up now.

Steve: But I think it might have been more valuable to work more deeply with just a couple of people rather than trying to mentor too many.

Tim: Well, you can have different levels of teaching relationships with people, right? So you could be a lecturer, and a lecturer is not a mentor, but that's still a valuable position to reach a broad audience. Being a lecturer is a good way to go. But a mentor reaches individuals.

Tim: To your point, you have to pick and choose. When you're seeking a student, a mentee, you're trying to find somebody who's going to be a good match for your style, and somebody you're going to be excited about helping for a long time. That's not everybody.

Steve: Yeah. Well, I guess I started leaning towards more scaled things, like I've got classes on LinkedIn Learning that have been viewed a quarter of a million times. So I've done more stuff like that.

Steve: But I think there's a lot of... I think it's cool, but I think on a human level, it's almost better to really have these deep connections with people where you're really getting into them. For the long term, you're golfing with them when they're retired.

Tim: Yeah, right. Well, by their very nature, deep, long-lasting relationships are few and far between. So you can't have lots and lots of them.

Steve: Yeah. Well, one thing I have found helpful with that is to get a recurring meeting on the calendar with someone. If you don't work with them, getting a quarterly meeting on the calendar with someone can be helpful. It's different, I think, for a true mentorship relationship. It has to be more frequent than that. But I do have relationships with people I meet quarterly in person or over the phone. Some of those are really valuable.

Tim: I completely agree. Calendarization is the key to making anything happen. You've got to put it on the calendar, commit to a recurring cadence, and then execute every time. Don't put those things off. Don't call the person the day before and cancel or try to reschedule. That kills the relationship right there for sure.

Steve: Yeah. A lot of mine are in turmoil right now because I've moved to Spain. So all these recurring meetings I used to have on Friday afternoon at four o'clock are now... well, that's 1 AM Spain time. That's a problem.

Practical Tips for Sales Success

Steve: Let's move on to the next section, sales in 60 seconds. Quick questions, quick answers. What's your favorite piece of sales advice that your mentor shared with you? You gave us one, what's the other? What jumps out in your mind? What's your favorite piece of advice you've shared with your mentee?

Tim: One of my favorites is that projects fail and people learn. I've stumbled many times, and when I do, I get pretty down on myself because I don't want to fail. I feel bad when I make a mistake. What Dick taught me was, "Projects fail all the time. If you're not taking big swings, you have no chance of hitting a home run. But when you take a big swing, you also bring the strikeout into play."

Tim: "So yeah, you're going to make mistakes, you're going to fail. When you do, you're going to learn some stuff, and then you'll learn how to succeed better in the future and how not to make that same mistake twice. So don't worry about it. Projects fail all the time. When they do, people learn, and people learning is very, very valuable."

Steve: Awesome. Was there something that jumps out in your mind that you've shared with your mentee?

Tim: Sure. What I tell my mentees is when things are going well, keep working. Find another time zone, call somebody in Spain, keep on working because whatever you're doing has become magical. You've got the touch that day.

Tim: The opposite is true. If you're having a bad day, just stop because for whatever reason, you're repelling people. The chemical imbalance is real. You're not succeeding because of something you're doing, and to keep doing more of it in an effort to work your way through it, that's not going to work. You're just going to repel more people.

Tim: Take a break. Go do something that you enjoy and free your mind from work, then come back the next day and give it another try.

Steve: Clear your inbox. That's fantastic advice. What about finding a mentor? How do you go about seeking out a mentor? Do you leverage online social networks? How do you connect with someone on this level?

Tim: I think you can use LinkedIn, for example, to try to find somebody. It's going to be somebody who's in your business. We talked about that earlier. Somebody who has more experience and wisdom than you do. Probably somebody older than you, more than likely, but not necessarily.

Tim: Probably somebody who's currently in your network or in the network of your close associates. I don't think you need to look very far because there are lots of people out there who are willing to help. I have found, honestly, almost everybody is willing to help. That's the number one criterion: somebody who is empathetic and a good listener and, of course, has wisdom in your business.

Tim: People know where to find them. At your own job, if you work for a big company like I do, find somebody in another business unit. That's the easiest way. If you work for a small company, you may have to find somebody who works in a vendor capacity. You wouldn't want your mentor to be from your direct competitor. That's probably not going to work too well, but it can be somebody who's near to your business but not in your company.

Steve: Makes sense. I think customers can even be great mentors at times in their own capacities because you can really go deep there. You can understand them so much better, and they can become... If you can get a coaching relationship going where you're being coached by your customers, that can be really powerful across the board. Especially if you're selling to always the same kind of customer. If you're selling to a dentist, getting a dentist to coach you can be really powerful if you really mesh with one.

Tim: Yeah, totally agree. Maybe if it's somebody else's customer, it might even be better. If you work in a sales team, and it's not your direct customer, they don't pay you, right? But they work with your associate, that might be a better opportunity because then their relationship doesn't impact your paycheck.

Steve: Yeah, makes sense. We talked about the length of time that you can have a mentorship relationship for. You've had one for 35 years with your mentor. What about in terms of shortness? Is there a limit in the other direction? If it's a really short mentorship, can it still be valuable?

Tim: Yeah, for sure. I've been part of mentorship programs where you get connected up with people who are seeking a mentor. So you put yourself out there, you say, "I'm willing to be a mentor." Then there are people who say, "I could really use a coach," and you get connected. The term is maybe a minimum of six months or a maximum of a year. I like these because they're time-bound.

Tim: You're trying to get something accomplished. It's not a social relationship. It's a business contract where they've got goals in mind, they need help figuring some stuff out, and you're committed to figuring that stuff out with them for six months or a year. At the end, you can decide: Are we going to take this long term in a less formal way, or are we going to terminate it? I've done both. I have done both with people.

Steve: Fantastic. Well, I'm going to try to summarize all the valuable stuff you've taught us about mentorship and coaching.

Tim: All right. Yeah, let's hear it.

Steve: So, a mentor is a great coach and someone who can nudge you down the right path. A great time to look for a mentor is at the beginning of a career when you're starting something new.

Steve: Look for a mentor who has deep experience in your specific field. That's where it's the most relevant and the most valuable.

Steve: When you're looking for a mentor, you want to look for someone empathetic, a great listener, and someone who puts your goals above their own interests—selflessness, willingness to give.

Steve: When hiring for a sales manager, you want to really seek out people who naturally have these great coaching skills and empathy and listening skills because that's such an important part of the management role in sales.

Steve: Great mentors see the long game. They look beyond just day-to-day and think about your year, your career.

Steve: When you run into a tough situation and no one's around to help you, make sure you practice "riding your own kayak." Solving problems on your own is a critical skill set, and your mentor can't do it all for you. We're not asking for them to do that, but we're looking to learn how to fish from them.

Steve: Another great lesson is that time kills deals. If someone's ready to buy, close it up. Ink the deal. Don't wait. Get it done today.

Steve: A great way to do this is to put together templates of your most common deals and have them in your back pocket so you can whip them out when you need to get a signature.

Steve: People buy for emotional reasons. Salespeople need to create emotional instigators with the questions they ask. Paint a picture of an optimistic future for your prospects.

Steve: Mentors don't set goals. They hold you accountable to the goals. They do this by asking questions about the goals. They ask you how you plan to reach the goal. They ask you whether you're following your plan.

Steve: Mentors aren't there to tell you what to do. They're there to ask great questions and provide guidance so that you can do it for yourself.

Steve: This has just been so valuable. I've really learned a ton from you today, Tim, about mentorship. This is not something that I think many people have the expertise in. Where can people read more about your work? How can they reach out to you to learn more?

Tim: Well, you can reach me on LinkedIn. That's really pretty easy. Or you can go to my website, which is timjrohrer.com. That's R-O-H-R-E-R.com. Also, if people want to, they can buy my book on Amazon. It's Sales Lessons of the World's Greatest Mentor, or you can search my name on Amazon and you'll find it.

Steve: Well, this has been a great episode of Outside Sales Talk. If you work in field sales, you'll love Badger Maps, the number one route planner that helps you sell 20% more and drive 20% less. Get a free trial at badgermapping.com today. If anyone knows any other salespeople who would benefit from learning the skills Tim has taught us today, definitely forward this episode to them.

Steve: Once again, thanks so much for coming on the show, Tim.

Tim: Thank you, Steve. It was great.

Steve: Take care. Until next time.