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Why Some Millennials Avoid Sales – and What You Can Do About it

By Jamie Crosbie

According to a research study conducted by Harvard Business School in 2014, sales positions (including sales management openings) are increasingly becoming harder to fill. In part, this is because younger workers do not appear to be all that enticed by a career in sales. Other surveys and studies have highlighted the fact that millennials are not as easily lured by traditional incentives such as money or prestige.

What Do Younger and Older Workers Value?

When surveyed about their preferences, the Harvard study showed that 64 percent of older workers listed stability and income as compelling reasons to work in a given field. Younger workers, however, put a higher value on quality of life and making a difference in the world. That means, while older Americans workers are more likely to be impressed by money, their more youthful counterparts find greater significance in doing something they enjoy or being of service to humanity in some way.

This may explain why other studies have shown that millennials often prefer creating their own path such as starting their own company. Far from lazy, younger workers simply prefer to emphasize quality and value over long-term security or income levels. Having grown up during the Great Recession, they are skeptical about finding career security by staying for decades at one particular company.

Whereas 53 percent of baby boomers stated they would rather work for a single employer for their entire career, 45 percent of millennials opted for changing jobs at regular intervals. They are also more comfortable with acquiring new skills. As much as 77 percent of millennials stated they are willing to return to school in order to add additional skillset, although rising educational costs may begin to dampen that enthusiasm.

Recruiting Younger Sales Talent: Retool Your Company Messaging

The hard truth is that sales organizations are fighting a losing battle with time. Aging sales professionals are getting harder to find, just as the up-and-coming millennials are turning away from sales. To effectively fill empty sales positions, companies need to aggressively target talent. To do so, they must also change the message to fit the emerging millennial narrative. This may mean adding value by helping them build fulfilling and meaningful careers.  

To compete, companies need to rethink and retool their message by emphasizing quality, individuality, flexibility, and community service. Besides helping fill empty sales slots, purpose-driven companies are more likely to have brand-loyal customers.

Take, for instance, the rise of small neighborhood brewers and microbrewers, which are challenging the status quo of larger companies. The emphasis has changed from mass-produced quantity to high-value, handcrafted quality.

This niche market is a good example of the differences in mindset and emerging marketing trends. Microbreweries are generally more inclined to craft unique, high-value fare. They also espouse a message based on community involvement, coupled with creative approaches and solutions. Their message is not just about beer, but also concerns reaching into an increasingly interconnected world.

While many other examples could be cited, it comes down to the perceptions of the upcoming generation. Companies that ignore the new models will face stiff challenges as younger sales talent move toward other careers. The bottom line is that, like sales, you have to tailor your message to your targeted audience, creating value for the buyer (and, in this case, the seller as well).

Jamie Crosbie is founder and CEO of ProActivate and an accomplished senior executive with a proven record of sales leadership success. A certified Peak Performance Mindset trainer, Jamie helps companies of all sizes increase their sales productivity by training them to think – and therefore act – differently. Contact her today to learn more – jcrosbie@proactivate.net or 214/720-9922.  

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Is Your Sales Rep Onboarding Program Broken?

By Lauren “LB” Bailey

If you haven’t spent much time thinking about the rep new hire training program you provide, it’s time to start. Here’s the part where I scare you a bit. Hang with me here.

  1. The number one reason reps are leaving companies is a lack of development (Aberdeen)
  2. The average time for reps to get up to speed (quota) is three + months for SDR reps and 6+ months for quota-carrying reps –with higher average deals equaling longer ramp (Bridge Group, CSO Insights)

On top of these statistics, I would wager at least five people in your latest group of hires are still actively looking (no, of course I don’t know this for a fact, but I do know lots of job-hopping millennials in inside sales … don’t you?).

Folks, here’s the point: There’s a hole in the boat! Recruiting is bailing out the boat and filling it with more people, but your training is helping them jump ship faster than recruiting can keep up.

Fact: If we trained our people better during their onboarding, they would be successful more quickly and stay longer.

That means faster to quota. That means reduced attrition. Less swapping of books, fewer interviews…what would you do with the time your floor could save on just fewer interviews? What would your sales managers’ commission checks be if half their team weren’t new? Oh yes, lean into the dream, my friends. Good training really can be this powerful. Especially new hire training.

I’ve looked at this problem from every angle (including the head of sales, the head of training for SAP, and now as a sales training consultant), and this is the cold hard truth: 95 percent of new hire training programs I see are not great. Actually, they kind of suck. Yes, brutal honesty is the theme here.

So I keep racking my brain. We have this roadmap: train them and they will stay! But I don’t see programs getting better and I don’t see enough people talking about it. Why? Here’s my hypothesis:

We don’t know it’s broken. We don’t know what’s possible. We don’t know how to fix it.

Question: Would you count your head of training as part of your inner circle? Ten bucks if you can tell me his extension without looking. Training leaders just don’t often act like strategic partners.

Quick story: A few years ago I was facilitating a break-out session with about 15 heads of big companies talking about training as a challenge (it keeps getting voted top three by the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals). The global head of one of the world’s largest software companies said to me: “LB, I don’t know what good training looks like.”

They went on to solve the training challenge by creating pipeline and manager process solutions. It was like they didn’t even know there were training solutions on the menu.

I’m here to help you guys. First, let’s do a quick diagnosis and see if you have a problem. If you say yes to at least half of these, Houston…we have a (you get it):

Is My Rep Onboarding Program Broken?

  1. The majority of your attrition occurs in the first five months. They like the company, don’t mind the job, but they’re not ramping fast enough to make money and they’re frustrated. Time to pull the ripcord.
  2. It takes your BDR reps more than three months – or your account managers more than six months – to ramp to target. There will ALWAYS be a ramp, but a great new hire training program can cut this in half (and significantly impact your attrition too).
  3. Average call length is about 90 seconds. These are voicemails. Every last one of them. If your reps can’t get people on the phone, keep them on the phone and get calls back, they weren’t taught phone sales.
  4. Your program is less than four days or more than four weeks long. The first is an orientation; the latter is a firehose. Get them on the phones after two weeks and bring them back for the rest of it!
  5. My reps don’t have a clear plan of attack for their lead list, book, or day. Ask them how they decide who to call. If they say they start at the A’s, then you’re missing a cohesive sales strategy – or your training department isn’t training it.
  6. You aren’t training business, customer, or industry acumen. Forrester taught us that over 60 percent of buyers found their sales rep added no value to the buying process. College isn’t teaching them how and we have to.
  7. You’re using the same training as the field. I get it: you had to use something and your org is new. But it won’t work and frankly frustrates reps to try this old-school model in their new-school world.
  8. HR is teaching your reps how to sell. 85 percent of the best in class use a professional sales trainer or curriculum. When’s the last time HR sold your product?

How’d you do? Some of these might take a custom report, but trust me: You’ll be glad you had it created. Your training department needs to be your partner like marketing is your partner – no, scratch that, recruiting is your partner…wait, I can do better…like payroll is your partner.

In a recent model we completed for Microsoft, we found they could add back over 50 million in revenue by cutting new hire sales ramp time down to best-in-class – and nearly double what they could save by cutting attrition to the same.

Did you really process that? Cutting ramp time in half can earn you nearly double of what cutting attrition in half could earn you. It will be like having another third of your headcount to help you hit the number – but without having to recruit, hire, or even pay for them!

So, please, pull the reports. Send in a trusted advisor to check it out. Meet your training leader. This could be the ticket to crushing your Q4 goals (or the massive spike they’re planning for your 2018).

Lauren “LB” Bailey is a 20-year sales veteran and a five-time recipient of the “Most Influential” designation for Inside Sales. President of award-winning training and consulting company Factor8.com, LB and her team are known for getting massive sales revenue results with training and consulting solutions.

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This One Thing Will Be More Scarce than New B2B Sales Jobs

By Eric Esfahanian

I was reading an article earlier today where a major bank CEO stated that a large percentage of bank employees will be replaced by robots “eventually.”

This got me thinking about the impact on bankers and the evolution of sales and client outreach in 2017. As CRO of Gryphon, clients often ask me about the role robotics and automation might play in the sales function and in sales jobs. So, when the CEO of a large bank makes a statement like that, I pay close attention to it.

Rise of the Machines

At the risk of stating the obvious, automation will play a large part in the future resource requirements of large firms – and, for many of them, it does today.

Sales isn’t immune to this phenomenon, either. People tend to think because sales requires face-to-face meetings and relationship building, it is less at risk for automation than, say, accounting. Though this may be partially true, companies are spending great amounts of time and money working to push more and more of the traditional sales cycle online so human interactions can take place deeper into the sales funnel.

Customers, too, are helping this along by doing more independent research before engaging with a provider. It’s foolish to think this won’t have a significant impact on staffing requirements. And, when it does, sales jobs will be harder to find and even harder to secure when they are found.  

The Solution for Sellers? Get Better Every Day

If ever there was a catalyst to motivate those who truly want to hone their selling skills, the specter of automation and robotics should be about the best.

Sales is a profession many people think they would be good at, but few actually are (similar to lawyers). Our profession is often defined by the worst representatives (the proverbial used car salesman comes to mind). Because of this, sales reps have the responsibility to “make themselves indispensable” through continually taking new risks; educating themselves in the basics of philosophy, sociology, and persuasion; and elevating their profession beyond the lowest sales clichés – with which we are all familiar.

The very best way to protect yourself and your career from being taken over by C-3PO or some self-service e-commerce URL is to invest in your own continuous improvement. Because, quite frankly, if your job performance is so one-dimensional and static that it can be taken over by a robot, it probably should be. Sales is one profession that, when done the right way, could never be replaced with a machine.

In fact, you should view automation as an advantage because it should not be something to fear, but something that can help you be your best. Embrace automation of low-value efforts that waste your time. This will concentrate your mind on truly strategic and important tasks.

Automation is terrific when what you are automating are mindless, repetitive tasks such as CRM updates, bulk email prospecting, and quote creation. Spend your time on meaningful efforts such as outreach to your VIPs, creating and delivering a winning presentation, or negotiating.

Make Your Talent More Scarce than the Sales Job

The answer to the supposed job scarcity coming in sales is fulfilling the “talent scarcity” that has long been a struggle for employers. In fact, it may be the reason firms are turning to robots in the first place. Instead of worrying about being defined and replaced by others, define yourself as one of the very best of your kind.

In the near future, the only thing more scarce than new sales jobs will be truly qualified people to fill them. So, if you make a habit of striving to get better each and every day, you will find yourself with many more sales job offers than you can handle – robots be damned.

For more than 20 years, Eric Esfahanian has been helping clients increase sales and marketing effectiveness with innovative business intelligence technology and processes. As chief revenue officer of Gryphon Networks, Eric is charged with driving the growth of Gryphon’s Fortune 500 client base with cloud-based sales performance management solutions that increase revenue and client retention while reducing training/onboarding times for large, distributed sales organizations. Previously, Eric held sales leadership roles with MicroStrategy, Hewlett-Packard, and EMC Corp. He received his MBA in entrepreneurship from Babson College and his Bachelor’s degree from Boston College.