How to Attract Millennials to Sales Jobs-Part 2

Yesterday's post titled, Why You’re Struggling to Fill Sales Jobs with Millennials and How to Change This, focused on the reasons why organizations are having a tough time filling sales jobs with Millennials. In today's post, we present five steps to help you solve the millennial challenge.

Here are the five steps your business can take now to help solve the millennial challenge.

1. Money really does talk. Time does, too.

Pay for performance with no cap. Far too often executives put a cap on sales incentive plans. That just turns off millennials. They view it as an arbitrary limit on their earning potential. And quite frankly they have point. Consider individualizing your company pay scale. Don’t be afraid to have unique bonuses for individual top performers. Put away the old-school invitations to a President’s Club winner’s circle. Instead, offer something that is meaningful to the seller—ahead of what’s meaningful to your organization.

Time off can be just as valuable as money. Consider the example of a sales director (let’s call him Brian) of an international software company. He successfully motivated his younger team members by offering them a mix of time off and some extra money to invest in what they enjoyed doing.

2. Catch people doing the right thing.

Praise goes a long way, even with younger employees. Millennials want to feel they are contributing to your organization and to your client base. Case in point: a client recently lost a top performing millennial seller who was earning $250,000 annually. Why? Because that seller felt her contributions were not valued by the CEO.

Take more time to listen carefully to their suggestions, and offer praise for good work. Just as important, go out of your way to highlight client success stories on a regular basis. When a client accomplished great things using your product or service this is a sign that you are not just “selling stuff,” but making a different to the lives of the people and businesses that you serve.

3. Flexibility is a big deal.

Does it really matter if your sellers are in the office 9-5 every day? Consider adopting flexible work arrangements for top performers, allowing them to work at home if they are producing.

Here are two examples. First, there’s Melissa, a young sales director based in the Netherlands, managing a team in Singapore. She chooses to work from Miami Beach throughout the winter. Her company’s leaders are happy with this arrangement because her results are excellent. Second example: David in Edmonton Alberta is a top seller who works hard at managing two territories and consistently delivers great results. His employer lets him go home every weekday from noon to four to rest up and have an early dinner. Then he comes back to the office and works late into the evening. While that’s not a great schedule for many people, but it’s ideal for David and his performance numbers back that up.

4. Be a leader, not a follower in embracing new technology.

Too often, this gets overlooked in organizations with legacy systems. Millennials are highly connected. Embrace a work style that encourages this, using multiple platforms and multiple media for reaching clients. Excessive limits on—or over-managing of—social media activities only repel this new generation of sales performers, to say nothing of what it can do to your reputation with customers.

If you’re worried about responsible behavior online, offer a class to sellers on what’s expected of them before you allow them to log-in to their platforms of choice. Never shut them off completely. If you find yourself on the wrong side of progress, you’re bound to be seen by millennials as not worth their time.

5. Rethink your expectations about retention and loyalty.

One of the biggest complaints companies make today about millennial hires is that they leave too soon and jump from job to job. That’s not a generational problem. It’s a symptom of a corporate problem: of not knowing how best to harness the millennial spirit, their capabilities, and of accepting that ambition is an important part of being young. The old way was to assume you would keep a seller in place for five years and it would only be in year two that they would become profitable. What if you assumed today that this seller was only going to be in place for two years? Could you onboard them quickly and make sure they were profitable in 6 months? The faster a millennial seller is profitable, the happier they are. The happier they are, the better job they do, and the longer they will stay.

Your next step: know what’s at stake.

Millennials have surpassed the Baby Boom generation as the largest sector of the workforce. Therefore, it’s vital that businesses get serious about tackling the millennial challenge: making your organization a more attractive place for this young, vibrant generation to invest their time and their considerable talents.

This is about more than chasing a demographic. These are the future leaders of business and the future top-performer in sales. You need them more than they need you. By making your company be seen as a great place for these young sellers to grow and thrive, you are positioning yourself for steady growth and accelerating sales for years to come.

? Matuson Consulting and Engage Selling Solutions, 2017. All Rights Reserved.

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Roberta Matuson is the Talent Maximizer? and president of Matuson Consulting. Her latest book is The Magnetic Leader: How Irresistible Leaders Attract Employees, Customers and Profits. Subscribe to her newsletter, The Talent Maximizer?

Colleen Francis is The Sales Leader ?, founder of Engage Selling Solutions and author of Nonstop Sales Boom: Powerful Strategies to Drive Consistent Growth Year After Year, among other titles.