How Boomers and Millennials Differ in Sales

I hate this article already – the last thing we need is another article to help us to understand Millennials.  Except for one thing.  Most of you reading this are Millennials and you probably need to better understand boomers.

We’ve all heard many of the distinctions of Millennials – how they like to work, where they like to work, when they like to work, how little they like to work, how entitled they are, how money isn’t that important, how they want to change the world and be a part of something bigger than themselves.  So I’m not going to write about any of that in this article.  Instead, I’m going to talk about several tendencies that differentiate these two generations of salespeople.

We can begin with Motivation.  Boomer salespeople are generally extrinsically motivated – motivated by money and things – while Millennials are typically intrinsically motivated.  They would prefer to love what they do and strive for mastery.  Here is more on the difference between these two types of motivation in sales.

We can talk about New Business Development too.  Boomers are much more likely to pick up the phone and make a call – even a cold call – to initiate contact and follow up and they prefer to meet face-to-face.  Millennials are more likely to use their social networks – LinkedIn, Twitter, Text and Facebook – to initiate contact – and email to follow-up and they tend to prefer selling by phone.  The two newest selling roles – SDR’s and BDR’s – are both top-of-the-funnel roles where the reps simply schedule meetings and calls for account executives.  These roles are filled almost exclusively by Millennials.  I hear you.  “But they are on the phone and you said they don’t like using the phone!”  Exactly.  And that explains why they are so bad at it. The latest statistics from ConnectAndSell tell us that these reps book, on average, 1.5 meetings per week.  If that is the only thing they are required to do, shouldn’t the number be more like 2-3 meetings per day?

And speaking of Selling Skills, Boomers are far more likely to have professional selling skills while Millennials are more likely to frame selling in the context of demos, proposals and follow-up.  It might not be their fault, as most of them are in the aforementioned top-of-the-funnel roles, while Boomers are almost always found in outside territory, major account, vertical or account management roles.

One of the new things that Objective Management Group (OMG) introduced last month is industry statistics where the results of a company’s sales force evaluation are compared against other companies in their industry.  Here’s an image from a slide that looks at the average scores for salespeople in 6 major strands of Sales DNA and how this sales force (burgundy) compares to similar companies (blue) as well as all companies (green).

Regular readers know that OMG has evaluated salespeople from companies.  I am hoping that in the coming months, we can filter our data by generation and share the differences in the 21 Sales Core Competencies that we measure.