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The Real Opportunity For Socially Connected Millennials In Sales

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

The Real Opportunity for Socially Connected Millennials in SalesThere’s a misconception that social and digital selling is ideal for the millennial. After all, they already use social media in their personal lives and are technology savvy. They’re also more pliable and adaptable to change. But being born with the ability to send text messages and tweets doesn’t mean that you’re an effective seller.

And sales enablement leaders often don’t realize this fact. They often think:

1. My older sales professionals aren’t going to get this. I’ll concentrate any education on the millennials; and

2. My millennials seem to be very strong at this. Maybe I don’t need to spend the time and resources to educate them on Social Selling.

Both of these beliefs are false—especially (b). In fact, these are two of the most common misconceptions about millennials. The reality is yes, millennials may have a complete understanding of how social works. But they’re missing some key elements:

  • How social integrates into a sales workflow;
  • How social integrates into existing sales process;
  • What are best practices vs. the bad habits they may have picked up?
  • How do they allocate an appropriate amount of time so they don’t get sucked into a black hole and spend half a day on social media?

In short, just because millennials already have an understanding of social, doesn’t mean they have the ability to create new sales pipeline, to leverage commercial insights and content from your marketing team to strike up new conversations, or identify triggers and referral opportunities.

However, millennials present an opportunity for organizations. Great organizations realize that millennials can be a wonderful testing ground for creating digital transformation in an organization. Because they’re adept at social media and more apt to desire to learn Social Selling, organizations can train these young sales professionals and get them up to speed. They can then demonstrate that positive impact to the more senior professionals, and show them how they can be successful with Social Selling.

By doing this, you’re leveraging the young millennials as a groundswell within the organization. Getting them versed in Social Selling through training can create a ripple effect throughout the sales department, and travel upwards to the more senior sales professionals.

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