What are we going to do about all of these Millennials?  If you are trying to sell to this important part of our demographic or if you work with them on your sales team, this article is for you. 

At times, the generation gap between them and the Baby Boomers seems like a vast, insurmountable chasm of hopelessness and confusion. The image many of us have is of a bunch of late-teens and twenty-somethings, usually wearing hoodies, who never look up from their phones and communicate exclusively in hashtags and sepia-toned pictures of their food.

But they’re also an essential demographic that can’t be ignored. So how do you engage them? How do you communicate your message to them effectively enough to turn them into customers? 

Well, there’s more to Millennials than just the tired stereotypes. But in order to deliver your message to them and be successful in selling to millennials, you need to bridge the gap and meet them on their level. 

Here are a few best practices:

1. Change Your Focus

It was estimated that by 2020, customers would manage 85% of their relationship with your company without any human interaction. 

Guess what, 2020 was the year we went to 100% virtual relationships.  This doesn’t sound like a good thing for salespeople. But it can be, if you let it. 

To reach Millennials, you need to shift your methods away from typical sales tactics of approaching the customer and pushing your product on them and towards methods of lead generation that pinpoint customers’ interest in your company and help them come to you.

2. Meet Them Where They Are

While the image of teens who never look up from their phones is an exaggeration, it is true that Millennials are the Global Generation and the Mobile Generation. They’re used to having the whole world at their fingertips wherever they go. 

A lot of their communication is done via social media, where they can connect to and interact with their entire world. Therefore, reaching them means becoming a part of that world. Gone are the days of cold calling and going door to door. 

Today,  90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers are active social media users.

To deliver your message, you need an active social media presence.

3. Let Them Interact

So what does having an active social media presence mean? It means more than just blasting your message into the ether in a tweet or Facebook post. If you do that, it will just look like an ad — and Millennials are very adept at tuning out ads. 

As we already covered, the days of approaching your customers and interacting with them directly are coming to a close, especially for Millennials. 

So how do you engage them enough to get your message across? 

By giving THEM the opportunity to interact with YOU. Millennials are used to an environment where any message can be commented on and added to. Their voice is as important a part of the message as yours. 

While for the less-evolved of the species, this may mean spewing vulgarities in response to YouTube or TikTok videos, for the average Millennial this means using your message to create a dialogue. Respond to their comments personally, answer their questions, address their pain points, and work with them to find out what it is they need and how you can help them get it.

Ready for More?

If your team is struggling to make the transition to virtual selling, be sure to check out our new program.

ASLAN Training and Development is a global sales training and consulting firm that offers customized, virtual inside sales training and what was once known as field sales training as well as sales leadership development that can show you how to best reach people of any generation, from Millennials to Boomers and more.

Learn more about what ASLAN can do to accelerate change in your salesforce. We would be happy to understand your challenges and see if we can help.  We started as an inside sales training company in 1996 and the challenges we faced then are in many ways the same as those we all face today.

Tom Stanfill

As Co-founder and CEO, Tom’s primary role is to create content that helps people live, sell, and serve more effectively. Find him on LinkedIn