Tired of opening your office fridge to find it full of coconut milk or vegan food? Or have you removed your conference table and replaced it with a circle of bean bags? Sorry Millennials, I know I'm stereotyping, but for us Generation X's it's taken us ten years to get used to your strange ways.
BUT there is a new change on the horizon.
Another upset to your cultural balance and working practices. Navigate this change successfully and your company will attract the best talent, gain traction and accelerate. Fail to adapt and you’ll fall behind.
Why? Because Gen Z are coming!
Millennials (those aged between 24yrs – 38yrs) are maturing. Taking up management and leadership positions, and if they’re not already your target customers, they’ll likely become your next corporate customer demographic, so you’d better know how to sell to them – and quick!
Meanwhile, Gen Z (those aged between 9yrs – 23yrs) are beginning to enter the workplace and it’ll be your Millennials who need to manage them. Oh, what joy.
So, what’s different about this lot?
Some consumer brands who already sell to Gen Z’s have this sussed, but the key difference is how they were raised, and therefore how their values and expectations of the world are different from the generation before.
Millennials don’t remember a time before Google. Gen Z don’t remember a time before a smart device. They learnt to swipe before they could talk.
Millennials were raised by the Baby Boomers, you know the ones. Bought a house for £2,000, grew up in the manufacturing boom, retired with both a workplace AND state pension. Therefore, their offspring (Millennials) have mostly grown up with economically comfortable parents. This has shaped their global views. They’re more selfless. Worried about the bigger picture, the planet, justice, doing the right thing. They value experiences over cool products, and they want to do meaningful work. Making money (especially profits for you) is about fifth on their list of priorities.
Gen Z’s meanwhile, were raised by Gen X’s. The ones caught up in the middle of the financial crisis, who found themselves mortgaged to the hilt, juggling crippling childcare costs with rising interest rates and squeezed household incomes. Both parents likely worked, just to make ends meet. This generation have drilled into their children that the world doesn’t owe them a living, that they need to go out and make it on their own. Therefore, Gen Z are more ambitious, entrepreneurial (61% would rather start a business than work for someone else), materialist (stuff the cool experiences, give me the cool products), and aware of their own value – because we raised them that way! These are the kids that when you shout, ‘Go tidy your room’, they shout back ‘Why, how much are you going to pay me?’
They are even more tech-savvy than their predecessors (interestingly though not in coding but in application and use of), they spend on average two hours a day on YouTube (their platform of choice), they have an even shorter attention spans than Millennials (8secs, compared to 11secs) and 11% have ADHD.
They are less concerned about green issues. (A smaller percentage are in favour of electric cars or buy organic). Rather than worry about work/life balance, they worry about work/life blend, (if you send me a WhatsApp or an Email at 10pm, I am compelled to respond, I’m unable to set my own boundaries.) The average Gen Z receives around 3000 texts a month! And their greatest fear is phone separation anxiety.
Millennials like a flexible working lifestyle and when they do come into the office, they’ll head for that circle of bean bags. They want to feel connected to their peers, to the cause and to doing meaningful work. Whereas a Gen Z is more likely to take that bean bag, go and sit in the corner on their own, put their headphones on and work alone. After a week of producing (what they consider to be) good work, they’ll expect a pay rise!
So how does this affect your business’ Sales Engine?
Well, I believe we should be hopeful. The biggest sales growth headache I hear multiple times a day from my clients and the scale-up community is lack of sales talent in the market. And I concur. It’s a massive problem.
Gen X’s were trained by Coca Cola, Xerox, P&G and in my case, American Express. Those types of structured corporate programmes (particularly in sales) just don’t exist anymore and as Gen X we’ve spent the best part of two decades educating our Millennials in how to combine their passions with sales competence. The world of selling has no doubt changed, but that still doesn’t account for the lack of sales ambition in our current employee population -generally.
Perhaps when Gen Z establish themselves in the workplace, we can leverage their innate desires of self-interest and ambition to help us still solve the world’s problems, but by making our businesses more successful in the process. Perhaps if we teach them that by developing sales competence they can self-actualise, and they’ll be hungrier as a result.
We’ll see.
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