Last week I was keynoting for my friend and client, Jim Tenuto, at his Renaissance Executive Forum annual meeting in San Diego — in person!. Inevitably, the first question of the event went something like this:

But millennials hate the phone. They won’t make calls. They don’t even use the phone. Right?

Actually, not right.

In my projects, client sales teams are guided through systematizing proactive phone use, to communicate with customers or prospects when nothing is wrong. This is the major technique that grows my clients’ annual revenue between 15% and 30% annually.

Among these sales teams, guess which people do the best with this work?

Guess who adds the most sales the quickest?

Guess who takes this work and implements it better than anyone else?

Millennials do.

Younger, newer salespeople do.

And it’s not even close.

Why is this so?

Because younger salespeople have growing families. They need bigger homes, and they have increasing expenses.

So, generalizing broadly here, they simply do the work.

The takeaway:

It’s not that younger people hate the phone, it’s that nobody has ever shown them how.

Rather, they are summarily dismissed as not being interested in the phone.

In fact, they want to use the phone, they simply don’t know how.

They didn’t grow up with it like those of us who are older.

And nobody has ever given them a system, or language, or tools, for generating sales with the phone.

Once they armed with a process and mechanics, they take the ball and run with it faster and better than anyone else.

What are you doing to help your Millennials — a generation that is now reaching beyond 40 years old — to leverage the single most effective selling tool there is?

If you would like to systematically help your Millennial (and all other) salespeople systematically grow your sales with the phone, please call me directly at 847-459-6322, or simply reply to this message.

Renaissance Executive Forum annual meeting keynote in San Diego last week.