How to find mentors

Doug Hall was the first sales hire at Glassdoor and VP sales at our competitor Entelo.

I got in touch with Doug for a mentorship session and here’s what I asked him:

What sales collateral and training materials did you create? Can you show me examples?

How did you train the new reps?

How did you source the new reps to hire?

How many meetings do you have with the team? What does your weekly schedule look like?

What performance metrics do you track?

What were the compensation plans?

And when Doug answered, I would dig deeper into it.

What were the exact steps

Can you show me the sales scripts?

All right. So you had your mentorship session.

How do you follow up and build a long term relationship?

I’d ask my mentors:

Would you be open to mentoring me for an hour a month at $500 per hour?

Or whatever rate they think is suitable.

When I start a business. I might have like up to 50 mentorship conversations.

For some of them I find that I learned so much from this person that I want to like keep the relationship going.

Eventually you’d get mentors in every area of business: growth, sales, products,

As well as in life: people management, mental health, family, productivity, learning.

And you create like a personal board of directors.

As you develop these relationships, what I found is three of my mentors:

Santosh Sharan, Jeff Deustch and Doug Hall ended up joining ContactOut!

If you talk to someone one hour every month, you really get to know them

and you talk about more than just business.

We’d cover family, philosophy, life, learning and productivity.

It’s the same with Jeff Deustch , who he was the head of growth at VIPKid, which is a 4 billion dollar unicorn.

Jeff joined us to lead growth at ContactOut.

I would have never dreamed in my life to be able to convince some of these folks at their caliber to join me in my business.

I’m some dropkick from Australia. I don’t even have a university degree.

But it all started with a mentorship call and building a relationship.

Here’s how you get a mentorship session with Bill Gates:

Alex Banayan was a 19 year old student. He emailed Bill, no response.

So then he went to conferences. First, he ambushed Tim Ferriss in the bathroom,

Tim took a liking to Alex, and then he was introduced to Chi Lu, who was a vice president at Microsoft

Chi who introduced Alex to Bill Gates Chief of Staff.

And eventually he managed to get a mentorship session with Bill Gates.

Alex wrote a book about it called Third Door.

So yea anything is possible.