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One of the crises many professional firms face today is a scarcity of loyal, talented, and experienced people.

What if, when you were age 24, one of the partners of your firm, whom you respected, invited you for a cup of coffee.

Then after some initial chitchat, the partner said to you, “I’d like to help you succeed in this business.”

Develop Your Staff’s Talents
What if that partner went on to say something like this: “We have several young staffers in our firm, but I’d like to coach you.

We hired you because you are talented and I think you are outstanding. I want to help you succeed here or wherever your career takes you.”

And what if, over time, that partner followed through? He met with you, watched over you, guided you, and helped you make better choices and avoid mistakes.

Many of the best people gravitate to firms that recognize, pay for, and appreciate them. Yet too many firms use a sink-or-swim approach with their young talent and often the firm is the loser in the end.

There is a way to help cure this problem once and for all if it exists in your firm: Develop a formal coaching or mentoring program.

A marketing coaching program can promote a can-do attitude throughout your staff. It can have a dramatic ripple effect throughout your firm.

You can help your staffers build a business network. And, should your protégé leave your employ, you will have a friend for life.

How to Do It
Coaching for success can help both your and your employees develop dramatically better skills. For the most part, you should only coach one or two people at a time.

Take them on sales calls, take them to Rotary Club, and take them home with you for a meal.

Talk to your young associate about what it really takes to succeed. Pour out your wisdom and help them build relationships and grow.

A basic rule for coaching is to be friendly, frank, fair, and firm. With that formula, you can grow an excellent crop of future partners and build your firm for the long term. Coaching need only take an hour or so a week, but it should be consistent.

Want to learn more on how to coach? One of my favorite writers, Linda Richardson, has a book titled Sales Coaching. The book, published by McGraw-Hill, can be found in your local book store.

Would you like to work more deeply and become a mentor? Whereas a coach is more skill focused, a mentor helps a protégé with his entire life: financial, physical, family, and faith. Bobb Biehl’s Christian-based book titled Mentoring (Broadman & Holman Publishers) is an excellent choice for people of all faiths.

2 The Value of Training to Train
Give your staff the training to train. For example, students of our Rainmaker Academy are asked to teach what they learned at the Academy to other people at their offices. No matter what the content area, research shows that teaching enhances learning.

1. People who are expected to teach pay more attention and learn more than students who do not expect to teach.

Preparing to teach will help embed the newly learned information more deeply into the attendees. We highly recommend the material be taught within seven days of learning it.

2. Training gets passed on to managers and others in the firm who have not attended the training session.

Everyone who aspires to leadership in professional firms must develop sales and marketing skills.

Training just one person from a firm impacts only that person, whereas training three to five people is obviously more fruitful.

3. Students subtly develop a mentoring and coaching program in selling skills. One student should train three to five others in the firm.

Training only a few others puts less pressure on the student and requires less logistical planning time.

For ongoing training, teaching the same protégés over time creates strong relationships among the team members.

If the teaching and coaching works well, the firm can expect to double the effects created from the student.

4. Students develop leadership and teaching skills. Good leaders model the activities for less experienced people to adopt.

As students implement training and are held accountable for doing what they say they’ll do, they become model leaders for their firm.

When others are also held accountable, they develop significant credibility within the firm.

5. Skills are delivered in a more cost-effective way. When the participants teach the material they’ve learned to three other people, the per-person training cost to the firm drops considerably.

Summing up
While the return on investment is still very powerful for one person’s training participation, the return on investment becomes overwhelming using the training to train concepts.