I have, since I’ve been running my own businesses, been fascinated with salescraft, or the process by which people buy things. But I don’t do a lot of content about sales and marketing on my channel because it’s not my core focus. I’d write about it every other day if I could.
However, I have for a number of months been talking about this idea which I think is hugely important about how businesses are changing their buying behaviour in 2023 and people seem to like this idea, so I thought I’d do a video on it.
After all, whatever your business is, you still need to sell.
There is a fundamental difference between how Gen X and Millennials buy. This is now becoming – ia major issue in how complex B2B sales cycles operate, and it also has some big impact on certain types of sales, particularly on consultancy.
The reasons why this is an issue today is that as time marches ever onwards, the average age of senior leadership staff within SMEs shifts generationally. When I started my career, Boomers were running businesses, so the process and philosophy of how those businesses bought was considered through the generational lens of how Boomers thought. Then for a while on average Gen X were the senior leaders.
Today, we’re seeing a shift where Millennials – now in their mid-30s – are having their seat at the table in business and are dictating how that buying process works within business.
Key to this is this theory of mine, in that Millennials do not buy advice. So if your core offer is advice-based – e.g. consultancy – or your sales engagement process if advice-led, Millennials have no time for this. And you have a problem.
I think there is a HUGE change in how Millennials buy, and this can be boiled down to two factors.
Firstly, Millennials were raised when the internet was a thing. Someone born in 1990 had the internet when they were starting school. By the time 2002-2005 rolls around and they are 12-15 years old, the internet is everywhere. Secondly, Millennials were educated in a way that was much less paternal and encouraged a sense of self-belief, which was very difficult to how individuals were educated before.
Gen X on the other hand – and in this video we’re talking just about Millennials and Gen X because that’s where the difference is, you can lump Boomers in with Gen X and Gen Z in with Millennials – we were brought up in a world without the internet, and in a school environment that was far more paternal.
Building a business is at its core a job of business process engineering – you have to find a bunch of resources and configure them in a way so that when working in concert, a functional business model emerges. The first difference between Gen X and Millennials is that Gen X were raised such that access to resources required negotiation from other humans.
For example, in my first job, I sold CD-ROM software. I had to have someone fax over a catalogue, and to buy the software, I had to spend half the day on the phone with our account manager in the US, placing an order that would ultimately be shipped. I wasn’t necessarily negotiating on price, but I did have to negotiate the transaction over the phone with my counterpart – they had access to something that I needed, and a human interaction was required to get that resource.
Millennials grew up in a world where resources are always accessible through online catalogues, and the whole procurement process can be done completely digitally. In that process, human beings do not serve as GATEKEEPERS into the procurement process. Millennials have – since their start in business – been able to find and assemble the resources needed to engineer their business processes without negotiating access to resources with other humans.
The other thing though comes down to how paternal the world is when looking at Gen X vs Millennials. I grew up in a world where elders – particularly men – knew things and decided things, and I with all the other Gen Xers were raised to believe that if you don’t know the answer to something, someone older and more experienced than you DID, and that if you wanted to know that thing, you’d have to convince them to tell you.
In the educational environment, everything was done in quite a Victorian fashion – you went through the course and had to demonstrate your own capabilities to a teacher who already knew what the answers were – i.e. the teacher was this elder person who gatekept the information.
My first experiences at work were the same as my dad’s experienced at work – I had an older (male) boss who knew the answers to everything and my job was to kind of learn how to come up with the same answers myself. If the answer to something was not known, the default was to find an older person who did know, and who would tell you that answer.
That is where we get consulting from as an industry – it’s a believe you can’t just work it out yourself. That old adage that a consultant is “someone who borrows your watch to tell you what the time is”, comes from somewhere – they gatekeep information and you need to pay them to get it.
If you then have a shift where, particularly in education, rather than punishing pupils for not knowing the answers you give them the message that the answer is in them somewhere and that the teacher believes in you and you can find that answer, that breaks that paternal model. Now you’re taught that you can probably figure it out, if you keep plugging away at it.
Add into that as well the increase of groupwork in schools – i.e. lumping a whole bunch of kids together and telling them you believe they know how to work out the best way to do something – what you have is a bunch of people who believe that they can work out for themselves what to do, and that the answer they come up with is probably good enough.
Bringing those ideas together – you have Gen X who learnt that a) to gather resources you had to negotiate with other people, and that b) someone older and more experienced them then knows the best way to configure those resources; compared to Millennials who learnt that a) to gather resources you need access to an online catalogue (and guess what, there are millions of online catalogues selling anything on earth), and that b) they can work out the answer as to how to assemble those resources themselves, you end up with a fundamental shift in how buying works, particularly in B2B.
Old school sales is inherently paternal in nature. In Gen X-land, the customer starts believing they don’t know the answer to the problem they have, but they can be easily convinced that someone else does because they have been brought up to believe the answer is always OUTSIDE and needs to be brought IN. The salesperson steps in “as the father” and does enough to demonstrate they do have the answer. The Gen X customer is also historically predisposed to want to buy from a human being as it’s more natural, even if buying online is more convenient. Therefore, a sales-led consultative approach works really well with Gen X.
In Millennial-land, the customer starts off believing they don’t know the answer, but is convinced they can work it out, because they always HAVE been able to work it out. The salesperson has no credibility here because the Millennial customer fundamentally doesn’t believe the salesperson knows any better than they do – they have equal chance of working out the same solution. Then, to a Millennial, buying via a human is not natural and actively less convenient than buying online. The consultative salesperson, really, has no role in selling to a Millennial senior leader.
And that’s just for buying normal things. When you’re selling advice – i.e. consultancy – the situation gets much worse because Millennials fundamentally do not believe in a two-speed system, where one bunch of people have no idea what’s going on and need to be told the answer, and that another bunch of people do have the answers, if only they could be convinced to enlighten that first person.
Millennials will work it out, and come up with a “good enough” solution. The difficult thing about this, if you sell consultancy, is that they DO work it out, and the solutions arrived upon are GOOD ENOUGH. Someone with 20, 30 years experience might look at what they’re doing and want to throw up because it just looks wrong or feels wrong, but those solutions work, and that can be really difficult to accept. I know this because I’ve struggled with this.
Where this is really hard in 2023 is that a whole load of Gen X who’ve worked 20-30 years in business now want to set-up as consultants, but are finding that Gen X and Boomer-led businesses are dying off, being related by Millennial-led businesses (if not now, wait until 2033), only to find that senior leaders of that generation just don’t have the receptors to deal with being sold consultancy or advice.
What they do have receptors for is being sold building blocks of resources that can somehow be finagled into their business process (providing you let them work out how to do this themselves). This is why, I believe, we see so much more success in selling on outcomes than we used to. Outcome-based selling IS the same as selling building blocks. “I will sell you done for you social media marketing”, “I will sell you a dashboard for tracking and reporting your KPIs”, “I will sell you a data protection officer-as-a-service”, etc.
So there’s two options – one, everything I’m saying here is rubbish and Millennials being more representative of modern senior leadership teams has no impact on what you sell or how you sell it because there are no apparent shifts caused by the introduction of the internet or changes in education, or two, some of us are boned. Let me know in the comments.