How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer – PART 14

How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer (PART 14)

TRANSCRIPT: Okay let’s jump into part six. Section six here, hiring millennials. It’s important to understand that connected buyers are all fairly similar, right? We talked about that, but millennial employees are actually a little bit different than previous generations.

For example, millennials prefer to work with and for other millennials. This doesn’t mean baby boomer managers have to go, but it does mean we need to be aware of this when we’re pairing up our teams for example.

Additionally, this is probably because of helicopter parenting, but 25% of millennials still consult their parents first about job decisions. That means they talk to their parents before they talk to their own managers or their coworkers. That’s important to understand.

About 6 out of every 10 millennials actually expects to leave their jobs within 3 years or less, their current jobs that they’re holding. 6 out of 10 expect to leave. This is important for you to understand in the car business because it takes about three years for the average dealer to recover the training and hiring costs of each salesperson that they hire.

79% of millennials would actually consider quitting their current job and working for themselves. Overall, millennials are much less likely to spend long hours at work. You might be asking, “Well, Steve this is the car business. We all spend long hours at work.” It’s something to consider. It’s something to think about as you look at how you’re going to structure your sales force moving forward.

By the way, millennials won’t work for jerks. In fact, according to Ernst & Young and PWC, millennials expect frequent communication and they want regular feedback. This is uncommon in car sales and so these are the things that we need to change with not just millennials, but all of our employees today. We’ve got to be frequent communicators if we’re in the manager chair. We’ve got to provide regular feedback and include some positive feedback in there as well.

Millennials want supervisors that value their contribution. It’s not enough for millennials to ring the bell. It’s not enough for some millennials just to be on the top of the sales board. They need you to tell them that you value this. That you value the sale that they just made. The grosses they just held. They need you to tell them this on a fairly regular basis.

Also, millennials want the opportunity to move up quickly. They want to know what that path is and they want flexible hours. Now again, you’re saying, “Steve, this is the car business. We can’t do flexible hours.” Eventually we’re going to have to. Eventually and by the way, a lot of successful dealers have already moved to sort of flexible hours.

Think about this. Every 25-car per month person you have on your staff, if they came to you and said, “Hey boss. You know what? I really don’t want to work Thursdays anymore or Mondays, so I want to have Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday off.” Most of you would say no problem. Most of you would have no problem with the 25 car per month person making their own schedule. We need to be somewhat flexible with millennials as well.

According to Harvard Business Review, evidence suggests that employees of all ages are actually much more alike than different in their attitudes and values at work. While I just told you all those things that we know are different about millennials. It’s important to understand that there’s a lot of things that millennials are just like Gen-X, just like baby boomer employees. The Harvard Business Review reports about the same percentage of each generation wants the same things from work.

For example, in the top career goals of one generation they’re about the same for millennials. For example, make a positive impact on my organization. Millennials and Gen-X are still about the same way on that. They all want to help solve social or environmental challenges. A large percent and fairly similar percentages on both sides. Fairly similar percentages also want to work with a diverse group of people. They want to do work that they can feel passionate about.

Here’s another one for us in the car business. They want to manage their work life balance, but dealers we still need to change. Okay? We need to change if we expect to stop the growing turnover problem in automotive. It’s getting worse because all employees want better workplaces and they don’t need to stay with you. That’s the thing to understand.

By the way, if you can solve turnover issues in your dealership, everything else is a cake walk. Now, we did a 13-part series on that already. You can go to SteveStauning.com. I’m not going to go through how to solve your turnover issues today. Just go to SteveStauning.com, look up full series videos along the right hand column, scroll all the way down until you see ‘Solve Dealership Turnover’. Click on that link and you’ll see our free 13-part series on how you can solve dealership turnover today.