Dear Dad: Selling to Millennials
Sales is personal. Ask any person whose job it’s been to sell another person a product, idea, or service and they’ll tell you this. Yes, there are tools we use to help increase the level of engagement or processes a salesperson can use to help create consistent and repeatable experiences, but still at the heart of any sale is the moment where a salesperson creates a bond of trust.
That’s what my dad taught me about sales. He sold used cars for 25+ years. He had a lot to say and teach about the business and I, as a little guy growing up under him, soaked it all in— after all I got to visit the car lot and play in the cars #LifeSizeHotWheels.
As you can imagine, his advice only picked-up steam when I joined a sales team in college, selling print advertising to SMB’s. Between his words and my personal experience, I learned a lot. But one thing that stood out to me was the realization that there was a huge difference between selling to my dad’s generation (Baby Boomers) and selling to myself (Millennials). The only bridge that existed between the two worlds was the importance of building trust.
The Sales Expertise
“I don’t sell a customer on a deal, a car, or a lifestyle. I sell them on Adee Groce (my dad). If they believe that I’m on their side, if they have trust in me, then the rest is easy…Trust is a multiplying force.”
And you see, he was right. During the time when he was bringing home top commission checks, he had figured out the winning formula:
Customer Dossier: Defines the customer, the more information, the more the salesman has to work with.
Sales Expertise: The innate qualities of the person selling, some can be taught, others are natural personality traits.
Trust: The belief that an honest and helpful relationship exists. Trust the multiplier
He would build a “Customer Dossier” by “reading” the person (personality, age, style, how they spoke), and start creating assumptions. Then he would leverage his charming personality to draw out simple details about who the customer was and how they lived their life.
If he did all of this well, he was creating higher levels of trust between himself and the customer — because he was taking the time to get to know the customer. The higher the level of trust, the easier the sale.
This bring us to the last part of his winning formula — himself. The customer needed a salesman like my dad because the salesman had all of the information about the product the customer wanted. Salesmen held the keys to knowledge. And as my dad always says, “knowledge is power, and in sales, knowledge is leverage.” That’s why salesmen like my dad were experts. They studied car history, market trends, consumer trends, and all of the spec’s on what they were selling.
My dad’s formula worked. It allowed him to maximize commission while also maximizing customer satisfaction — he was the kind of salesman you kept coming back to, even though you knew he was making a hefty commission, because at the end of the day you trusted him and he delivered value.
The Formula Fails
But as my dad entered into the new millennia his winning formula stopped working. The tables seemed to turn, and his expertise became unimportant. The internet changed everything.
You see, my dad’s “winning” formula was missing an important element. His formula failed to include the era he was selling in. He was still able to sell to Boomers — though even that became harder and harder — but it simply failed with Millennials.
The 2000’s brought about mass adoption of technology and a consumer base that we’ve coined “digital natives.” Millennials like myself were showing up. And as the 2000’s ticked by, the speed of change only accelerated.
The failure of my dad’s sales formula, and those that lived by it, was terrifying because it failed to incorporate technology.
Technology was democratizing information and creating powerful consumers who could bargain hunt across the country — and the world — for the best deals. The very livelihood of the salesman came into question. I remember my dad’s fear around losing his job as friends and co-workers began to lose their jobs all around him.
You see, technology and automation — while all great in theory — can mean the loss of jobs, and the discomfort that comes with a changing world. In the car industry, the internet made buying a car easier. For some, they preferred doing the entire buying process online. This had immense implications on the commission earnings for car salesmen across the U.S. The consumer now had more information — and remember “knowledge is power” and consumers now had that power to leverage against sales organizations.
It’s not all bad news!
If you’re a salesperson today, don’t lose faith. In true “father like son” fashion, I’ve spent some time tweaking good ol’ dad’s formula.
But first, if you’re selling Millennials, you need to understand us.
How Millennials Buy
As a Millennial, the way we buy is fundamentally different. This is something you need to understand if you’re trying to sell to us. There are plenty of goods I’d rather buy from my Amazon Echo or from some of my favorite chat-bots. I have no problem cutting out the the salesperson in the process. And I’ll be honest, I often find the digital buying experience preferable, because organizations that don’t understand Millennial buyers are exhausting to deal with.
You see, I expect a catered and personalized shopping experience. I get this online, and it frustrates me when I’m forced to call a company and the experience is anything but catered and personalized.
I love that when my Uber drive picks me up, he know’s where I’m going. On the other-hand, I hate that when I talk to a customer service specialist at Comcast I have to tell them why I’m calling, who I am, my account password, the last four digits of my SSN — my goodness!#&! I use my phone number for secondary authorization on your website and I can do all of this in an instant there. How is it less efficient to speak to a human?
And that’s where the fundamental problem lies. Humans are becoming less efficient than the technology we use when it comes to sales.
This means that today’s and tomorrow’s salesperson needs to accept that my dad’s version of selling is dead. It’s never going to work with Millennials. They need to acknowledge that Millennials expect and demand a sales experience that goes one of two ways.
We expect either an effortless fully automated sales process or fully concierge sales process with a human that knows us and our needs. Think Amazon vs. TrunkClub.
At the core of both sales experiences lies trust, but it’s built in fundamentally different ways. In Amazon I trust that I’ll get exactly what I ordered quickly and efficiently. With TrunkClub I trust that the information I’ve given my stylist and the relationship we’ve developed will equal a perfect fitting. When I receive my personalized trunk of clothes, and my stylist makes a mistake, I know I can simply return it and she learns from the experience. With every trunk she gets better and better.
The Millennial Salesperson
So, if you’re a salesperson that’s been following my dad’s formula, here’s what needs to change. The Millennial Salesperson needs to understand that the opportunity exists in two areas.
First, you have more access to information about me as the buyer than ever before. The Millennial salesperson leverages that information by studying it and figuring out what’s relevant to her, once this is determined she creates a process that streamlines her access to that information — the faster she has it, the more successful her sale.
The types of information you should be accessing include:
- Online buying habits
- Credit score
- Information around what the customer presents to the world on social media
- Customer job title and place of employment
And this just represents the tip of the information iceberg. The goal here is that you need to develop a personalized dossier on the customer.
Second, you need to seize the opportunity of existing in a world of information overload. Thousands of pages load when you search for nearly anything, and there are hundreds of websites that claim expertise on any number of areas. It’s over-whelming and it causes us to use the top few links of a search result — while simultaneously knowing that those links may not represent the best set of data.
The opportunity for the Millennial salesperson lies in supplying your customer with high quality curated content that allows them to digest the information.
Be authentic, and tell me about competitive pricing, what analysts and customers have to say about the product/service. Tell us anything that we’re going to find by searching Google, because if you don’t, you will lose our trust. This is an opportunity to showcase your presence as a salesperson — because whether it’s in person or online, sales is fundamentally about building a relationship based on trust.
This means the new formula looks like this:
Technology: Technology will define every era moving forward. Those that use it well will find it to be a multiplying force on every part of the sales formula
Quality Content: Transparent, catered, and quality content is a key element when selling to Millennials. We are the TL;DR generation, so don’t make us do more extra research.
Concierge Service: An understanding that the customer comes first.
You’ll note that the formula is multiplied by technology. This is because the Millennial salesperson’s success is multiplied by her ability to successfully integrate new technologies into sales processes. It’s my belief that there’s great opportunity for humans to leverage technology to sell to Millennials in more effective and personalized ways.
Living by this formula will allow younger and often inexperienced salespeople to excel and perform at the level that my dad performed during his prime. The Millennial Sales Formula is about acknowledging that things have changed, and that by doing so, salespeople can dominate in todays world. I shudder when I think about how effective my Dad would be utilizing the Millennial Sales Formula. You see, his original formula may be dead, but the underlying skill-set he possessed is in-fact still relevant in todays world. He just needed to evolve with the times and leverage technology, instead of fearing it.
As the son of a salesman, a Millennial, and a digital native, it’s my belief that there will always be a place for the salesperson in the world of selling high priced goods and services. I believe that no algorithm can successfully piece together the details about the increasingly complex lives we live today. The true customization all Millennials yearn for requires to the human touch. It is this touch that delivers a sense of faith and trust in the product/service we receive. To achieve this, we need a new kind of salesperson, we need The Millennial Salesperson.
