Q&A With Marco's Jeff Gau: How Millennials And Boomers Bring In Sales

It seems as if today, the millennials have the skills that can make a consultative sales strategy work better than the boomers can. What's your take on it?

There are a couple of things that go on. You've got the baby boomers and the Gen Xers. To me, they're [kind of] the same. They’ve done well in sales to get where they're at. If they’ve established their base and their business and they have specialists to work with them, they do a pretty darned good job. But they're needy. They need more people [like] sales engineers to be with them … contemporary technologists. And most of the people who go with them are millennials. So it's kind of funny; you can have a 50-year-old go in, and they're going to [be accompanied by] three millennial engineers.

[Boomers] do a pretty good job of getting in front of customers with their established base. I think where they probably fall a little short is [in probably being] a little less likely to use some of the tools that can make them better [like Salesforce], maybe some of the information that’s available to them outside of their traditional rolodex.

What I like about [millennials] is they're on the front end of their career. They're just like we were. When we were on the front end of our careers, we were pretty anxious too. We were ready to set our mark; we were ready to make an impact. So, over the decades, we forgot that we used to be young ones too. We were all pretty anxious to have some success.

Millennials … are here to make their mark. They're also … more mobile, more open, maybe, to move to the new markets. They adapt.