Q&A: How Do You Sell to Millennials?

Hi there. Throughout the year, I've received a lot of questions from my friends on Facebook. So we've decided to sit down and answer these questions and let me give you my thoughts and insights and experiences, and they may be helpful to you. And questions from one person may be a question that you might have asked yourself. So let's get started.

Louis From Facebook asked, Mr. Tracy, with the Millennials getting older and becoming a major consumer of big purchases such as real estate, how can a salesperson deliver mega credibility to a cynical generation towards salespeople who are relying solely on the Internet for information or consultation?

Well, salespeople today are facing a lot of challenges. But if you're talking about property, if you're talking about any kind of big dollar ticket, all sales are done head to head, face to face, heart to heart, knee to knee. Is. The Internet is wonderful for gathering information, and it's wonderful for communicating with people after you have met them face to face for the first time. It is absolutely astonishing to me how many salespeople, not yourself, of course, are so panicky and terrified of rejection that they will do everything possible to put up a wall of Internet messages between them and customers. And they don't understand why people don't buy. Do you know what the most worn out button is on anybody's keyboard? It's the D button for delete is people get hundreds and thousands of messages from unknown people all day long. And what they do is they just sit there and they go, DD de, de de de de, de de de de, including your messages as well. So the only way that you can sell big ticket items to millennials or to anybody else is you're going to have to, as we say, suck it up, man up. And you're going to have to go out and talk to people and you're going to have to introduce yourself to people. Now, here's the second part is you're going to have to be very, very good at what you do because you're competing against every other person who is trying to sell a similar product to the same market base. And the only way that you can sell is you have to be perceived by the prospective customer as the very best person to do business with, which means that you are more knowledgeable, you are more skilled, you are better organized, you put in more hours. My son is in residential real estate now, and he's going through his initial experience. He makes as many as 500 calls a month. He makes 10, 20, 30 calls a day. He'll make 50 or 60 calls to get one tentative appointment to talk to a person about potentially listing a property. And the interesting thing was he has to make an enormous number of appointments to get it calls to get a single appointment. But he's making fewer and fewer calls and getting better and better appointments. He's paying his dues, he's paying the price. When I began selling, I went out knocking on doors. And sometimes I would knock on doors from 8 in the morning till 9 at night, sometimes 13, even 14 hours a day and not make a sale. I would knock on office doors in the daytime and I'll knock on home doors and apartment doors in the evening. I would actually run from door to door so I could cover more ground. And I would knock on doors and give my presentation. Sometimes I'd work for a week and make a single sale. I found that starting off in sales is a wonderful weight loss program because I lost about £10. I got down to the thinnest and fittest of my life, moving from call to call. So there's really no simple solution. I would ask you, how many audio programs on sales have you listened to? How many tens, twenties, thirty, forty, fifty hours have you listened to? How many seminars have you been to? How many sales books have you read? Do you read one or two hours in sales every day? How many people have you spoken to and how many calls do you make every day? In the final analysis, there's fabulous business out there. As you say, the millennials by the tens of millions are emerging into high income, high expenditure markets. But you're going to have to go after them tenaciously because there's hundreds of thousands and millions of other salespeople who are going after them as well. And you have to be better than they are. Now, I've given you a couple of ideas. So the most important thing that you can do is to take action. So what one action are you going to take as a result of these key ideas that I've just given you? Whatever it is, jot it down and let me know. Remember, one action that you take that you would not have taken in the absence of this discussion can change your life forever.