New Generation of Decision Makers
Two things are about to happen in IT Sales.
- Millennials will soon account for a high percentage of decision makers in IT.
- Millennials will soon apply to fill most open requisitions for entry level sales in IT.
Interesting, isn’t it? The first wave of millennials will be hitting their 30s – they’ll be managers, directors, CEOs and founders. The final wave of millennials will be starting college and will graduate to their first jobs in the next five years. This shift is going to change prospecting as we know it. Soon, everyone that was raised 100% using technology at home and at school will take on the roles of both buyers and sellers.
Soon. Not now. Not right now today.
We still have a high number of decision makers in the 40 to 60 year old age range, and those people grew up without technology. I’m 42, and I didn’t have email for work until I was 26. I learned how to do my job – sales – using the phone first and technology second. As did all the decision makers and sales reps who came before me. We now have millennials in sales roles, and this translates into the first generation to grow up with low-cost and unlimited access to “all things tech” selling to those who may still be using a paper-based diary and a cradle phone. Sound messy? It is.
Creating a sales process around targeting millennial decision makers makes sense. You’ll eventually need a strategy to do this. You’ve got five years before it will start affecting you, and ten before it will hurt you, so let’s not obsess over it today. Quite frankly, most SMB IT companies still don’t have a great process in place to sell to today’s buyer, let alone tomorrow’s. Put plainly: We’re all spending a lot of time worrying about how we’re going to sell to people who aren’t buying yet.
A bigger issue for immediate consideration is this, and it still involves millennials. Sort of.
As companies fight to attract and engage younger team members, they have started to change their cultures from those of top down decision making to those with more collaborative approaches. This has created a problem for those selling in these new cultures:
Everyone is now a decision maker. Which makes nobody “the” decision maker. Instead of worrying about how we’re going to sell to millennials, we should be preparing our teams to sell to multiple points of entry within all companies. A collaborative decision making culture means you’re going to need to build sales processes to connect with champions, influencers, and evangelists – not single decision makers. Needing to listen to the end-user and build that outcome used to be simpler. We’d find out who the decision maker was, create a ‘buying persona’ and pitch based on the challenges and motivations that we knew had the highest percentage shot of resonating with that title. We would be creating our intellectual property and telling our story to one level. You’d choose to sell either ideas or infrastructure based on your audience. Where you’d previously need entry level sales trained to a handful of talk tracks, you will now need to train your entry level sales team to handle an unlimited combination of entry point sales pitches – think three levels of increased authority across six different areas of responsibility – that’s 18 variables you’ll need to train to. That’s going to change how you hire and who you hire. The days of hiring 10-dollar an hour telemarketers are over.
Is there good news?
Yes. Here’s the silver lining: when you can have 18 different conversations, your first touch to conversation ratio goes up significantly. If you can only have one conversation with one title, you might get to talk to someone once out of every 300 attempts. If you can talk to eighteen different people, you get to the win a whole lot more often, a whole lot faster. And you can create urgency at all levels.
So (and I bring this up because it ALWAYS comes up when we talk about millennials) what about all this discussion around selling to the new buyer in a new way? What of the “buyers do 70 percent of their research and then call you” school of thought? Well, I can use an example from my own business to answer that: we get 20 inbound leads a day here most days, give or take. Those 20 leads each require about an hour of our time to qualify or disqualify. People may do their research before calling you, but that doesn’t make them good prospects. Very often, the kind of business you want isn’t the kind of business that just walks up to your door looking for a new IT company. Most people, if asked, will tell you they’re just fine with their current provider. It’s your job to find new prospects, identify that they’re the type of business that you’ll support well, and if they are, convince them to give you a shot. Anyone who tells you that cold calling is dead is trying to sell you software. It’s alive, it’s well, and it works. And it’s going to keep working for at least ten more years. Then, you’re on your own. I’m planning to retire in five.