4 Things Your Young Salespeople Need to be Successful
Updated: May 30, 2023
top of page
Search
4 Items to Include in Your Coaching Sessions With Your Young Salespeople
Worldwide, the population group called Millennials is just over 75M people in the US; that’s larger than the number of Baby Boomers. But for us sales managers, the employment numbers are more interesting. According to MarketWatch, the most recent numbers in 2017, tell us about 56M Millennials were either working or looking for a job. That beats out 53M GenXers, and 41M Baby Boomers.
When working with sales managers and leaders, they tell me they sometimes find great potential in their young salespeople. Other times, they’re terrified the younger generation is too entitled or doesn’t have the core skills needed to excel.
We’ve already shown that Millennials can sell. When I consult with sales managers, here are four core elements I tell them to look for and develop to give their young salespeople a foundation of success in sales.
Get Your Young Salespeople Comfortable with Failure
Salespeople must learn to fail early. There’s a lot of reaction in sales, and sometimes you completely miss. In general, I wouldn’t say companies are great at embracing failure, but they oftentimes grow from it; your salespeople will too. The trick here is framing it as a learning experience so they can perform a behavior correction the next time they face a similar situation.
Here’s a recommendation: have them run a meeting or ask for an order 3-6 months in and don’t bail them out. Just be sure to perform the postmortem after the event to review what went well and what could be improved.
Help Your Young Salespeople Develop their Impromptu Skills
Most interactions in sales happen quickly and they have to be aware of what their prospect is doing and adjust their responses on the fly. But most sales managers don’t train that way. At Tyson Group, we’ve done call center research showing that on average, the salesperson has 7 seconds to get a prospect’s attention. It’s hard to win favorable attention quickly in sales, especially when you are new to the field. And trainers make it worse by training around long role-playing sessions. Instead, focus and develop your young salespeople’s extemporaneous skills.
Keep Score
This is important to Millennials. Whether they’re chasing Instagram likes or a potential promotion, this is a generation where metric scoreboards matter way more than they did for the Boomers. Competition drives their efforts. Don’t believe me? Ask your kid who scored the most goals in their last soccer game, they’ll know. The challenge is using that to boost motivation and change behavior. When operating our call center, we constantly used games and contests to drive performance. We rewarded performance, we kept score, and for the Millennials, it was a source of motivation. My suggestion, segment your recognition system along generational lines and let competition drive your young people.
bottom of page
Comments