Stop Talking About Millennials2. Stop Talking About Millennials!
Far too often these days, businesses are practically falling over themselves to attract
Millennials to their sales teams, making compromises in all kinds of places where they
shouldn’t. And I’m tired of it.
Don’t get me wrong: every generation is important. And, it’s smart to achieve the right
balance in your work force to reflect your buyers and your market. The mistake I see today
is where organizations compromise on pretty much everything to attract younger
generations without first understanding what’s already working well in their line of
business.
In other words: they fail to recognize what doesn’t need to change…and misdiagnose what
does need to change.
© Engage Selling Solutions Inc. 2
3. Alignment is Key
Finding the right people has nothing to do with age or gender. It has everything to do with
matching skills with goals.
You will not find that match if your recruiting strategy is built on the false assumption that
an entire generation thinks a certain way or values a narrow list of rewards.
You grow by finding good people—the right people with the right skills — and by offering
them work (and a way of working) that is compelling to them. That happens only when you
treat people as individuals and not as faceless members of a giant-sized generation.
Let’s look at a few examples of how you should be matching skills to your goals and
business structure.
© Engage Selling Solutions Inc. 3
4. Alignment is Key
Fearlessness for startups: If you’re a startup or are moving into a new market, you need
people with razor-sharp business development skills. They must be fearless, wildly creative
and immune to rejection.
Nimbleness for value-driven businesses: If you’re selling a value-priced product or
service, you need people who are great at quick turnarounds and who can close a sale in a
single call.
Management smarts for complex organizations: Selling a complex, multimillion dollar
product? You need to match that with people who can manage a long sales cycle and can
work tenaciously though a multi-stage selling process.
Eloquence for challenging products: If you have a challenging product line that defies a
typical description of features and benefits, you need creative, eloquent people who can
explain complicated ideas in ways that customers can quickly understand.
© Engage Selling Solutions Inc. 4
5. Clarity Means Everything
There’s no generation out there—or any other demographic—that’s going to solve your need
to grow through recruiting.
Clear, consistent business goals, on the other hand, will give you what you’re looking for:
accelerating sales, a well tuned highly skilled sales force and an utterly magnetic sense of
purpose and opportunity that talented people will flock to join.
© Engage Selling Solutions Inc. 5
6. Final Thoughts
As more millennials enter the workforce, it’s not likely that we’re going to stop hearing
about them anytime soon.
But, recruiting based on a label and brushing an entire generation with the same brush is
not likely going to yield the results you’re seeking.
© Engage Selling Solutions Inc. 6