I wish I had a property manager I felt was ready to become my new district manager.

But I don’t.

Comparing my property managers to candidates from the outside, I can see that I haven’t done a good job preparing my property managers to make the jump from single to multi-unit management.

The Missing Skill

One skill that I find consistently lacking in single-site managers that is absolutely necessary for a district manager is the ability to find meaning in data pulled from financial statements and other management reports. The business’s numbers tell a story, but most property managers are innumerate.

That’s not a slam or insult.  Most of the smart people I know wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to make of financial statements or other data relevant to the operation of a self storage facility without some help or coaching.

An Example

When looking at revenue it is easy to see whether it is trending up or down; however, the trend alone is not much of an insight.

To get insight you have to ask deeper questions. If revenue is trending down, is it enough to be alarmed, or is it just seasonal? Why is it trending down (or up)? What is the appropriate response? Lower prices, raise prices, more advertising?

Did  a change in occupancy cause the change in revenue?  Perhaps she looks at delinquency to see if an increase in uncollected rent has lowered the month’s revenue.

Or maybe the amount of outstanding uncollected rent has remained consistent, but fewer people pre-paid this month causing a dip in the store’s pre-paid rent balance. In this case fewer prepaid rent dollars shows up as a decrease in the collected revenue for the month.

Reduced revenue for the month due to reduced occupancy requires a certain response.  Reduced revenue do to increasing delinquent accounts requires a completely different one. And finally, reduced revenue due to a reduction in pre-paid rent is probably nothing to worry about.

These are just a few of the conclusions I rely on my district managers to get right.

Can You Fill The Gap?

My property managers are, by and large, completely capable of doing the types of financial analysis I’m describing here. My problem is that I’ve never really given them the chance to try, to learn, or to practice.

Is there a way to help your property mangers practice?

I think so.

Here’s an outline of how it could work.

• Start by providing them with more data and ask them to interpret, draw conclusions, and make recommendations based on the data.
• Give them feedback and let them try again with the data from the next month or from another store.
• List out the common analyses and explain how to do them and why they are done. (That could be another blog post itself.)

It would be interesting to see who would be the most adept at the analysis. The high potential property managers would self-select.

I’m convinced that even if I never have the opportunity to promote the property managers who become competent in this area it would still be a win. They would be more engaged. They would be better able to self-manage and self-correct. Hopefully when life pushes them out of my organization and into another job they are ready for more responsibility and higher pay. I would consider that a win too.

It looks like I have a little bit of work to do in 2012 in further developing my team.  How about you?

P.S.  If you are the district manager I’m looking for or know someone who is, feel free to email me.  My email address is on my about  page.

Photo credit: Herval

Big businesses looking to fatten the bottom line often cut head count as a way to reduce costs. For big companies making cuts is often the easiest short-term move.

On the other hand you rarely see big companies in a pinch to improve profits look first at improving their employee’s skills, engagement, or their buy-in to the company’s vision. Taking that approach takes more time and more work, and success is never guaranteed.

Big business’ approach is a bad model for most self storage operators.

You only have one or two (maybe three) full-time people working at each of your locations.  With such a lean staff, where are you going to cut? My guess is that making a decision to cut doesn’t seem easy because cutting staff isn’t your opportunity.

No, the real opportunity for you and I is to do the opposite of the big companies and improve the bottom line by getting more out of our people. The way you are going to move the needle is to build up your staff. Your opportunity is to help them fully engage so that you are getting their mind and heart, and not just their hands.

So how do you do that??

Here are some questions derived from research done by the Gallup Organization to determine if your company has a management approach that leads to employee engagement,  How are you doing on these?

1. Does each person know what is expected of him or her?  Are you sure?  If you asked each person in your organization, would they give you the answer you want?
2. Does everyone have the materials and equipment to do their work right?  How do you know?
3. Do your front-line property managers have a supervisor or someone else that cares about them as a person?
4. Is there someone who actively encourages the development of your on-site property managers?
5. Do you overtly encourage the development of your property managers? Is it obvious enough that if I asked them the same question your employees or direct reports would agree?
6. Are your property managers surrounded by other people doing quality work?  I like to work around other winners. Don’t you?
7. In the last six months has someone talked to each of your property managers about their progress?
8. If I asked your property managers “Do your opinions seem to count?” what would they tell me?
9. Would your property managers agree that the mission/purpose of your company makes them feel their job is important?

Did any of the questions above make you pause and think that there is more you could be doing to increase your employee’s engagement and productivity? If so, let me know what you found most profound or provocative in an email or in the comments.

The questions above are adapted from the Gallup Organization’s Q12 survey that measures employees feelings of engagement at work. You can read more about the questions in their books First, Break All The Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently and 12: The Elements of Great Managing.

 

Motivating storage managers to sell is a lot like surfing because its easy to do all the wrong things.

When I first tried surfing I exhausted myself trying to “catch” waves.

I sat on top of my surfboard with my feet dangling in the cool water and watched the waves roll in. Time after time I would see a wave approach and I would turn myself around so that I was pointing toward shore, lay flat on my stomach and paddle mightily trying to catch the wave.

After about 45 minutes, with my arms feeling like Jello and my ribs sore from laying on the hard deck of the surfboard I paddled back out and rested, to tired to continue trying to catch waves over and over again. As luck would have it after about 10 minutes of resting on my board a wave approached and began to break.  I happened to be in just the right spot to be picked up by the wave and with just a couple of strokes I started sliding down the face of the now-sloped water.

In that moment, I realized success had everything to do with putting myself in the right position in the ocean and very little to do with how hard I could paddle to catch the wave. Once I put myself in the right position the unyielding forward progress of the ocean took over.

A surfboard doesn’t have a motor because all of the power you need is in the waves that are passing under (or over) you.

The same is true in your organization. There is more power rolling under the surface than you may recognize.

As owners  or managers we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to push our people forward. Often this is the wrong approach, akin to paddling and paddling in an effort to catch a wave.

Instead, it might be time to rest a minute.

Instead of pushing (paddling), work on finding and surfacing your organization’s higher purpose.  Tapping into values and ideals bigger and higher than yourself positions you in the path of an existing wave of emotional energy.   This emotional energy remains dormant in most organizations.  Now that you know the secret, you can use it to build your business and serve your customers and community.

Here are some action items to get you started on finding, surfacing, and channeling this untapped reserve of energy and passion.

1. Recognize that you don’t have to be the boss to instill a sense of purpose into what you do, and what your company does. Purpose comes from the heart, not from the marketing department. If you are not at the top, feel free to start from where you are, look for a higher purpose, and then start spreading the idea through your sphere of influence. (Hint: This might be the biggest idea in this entire blog post.)
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2. Survey your company landscape. Do you see or hear anything going on at your store or corporate office that would indicate people are working for anything more noble and inspiring than trying to make a few bucks?
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3. Ask the people who work for you (or with you) what they think the company stands for. Did you get corporate-speak or a blank stare? If so, you know you are missing the mark. If, instead, you get responses that are connected to deep values or that stir the soul, then you are on the right track, keep going.
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4. Is there any consistency to the answers you are hearing to the question in number 3? If you are on track, how can you push those feelings into the nooks and crannies of your organization? (Yes, you actually have to stop and think for a minute. I’m not in a position to prescribe how you should make this happen.)
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5. If you asked you customers what your company stands for would their answers agree with your answers? If there is a disconnect, how are you going to bring the two together?
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6. How can your purpose be big enough, and overt enough that it actually makes a difference? A lot of companies have a mission statement that is collecting dust somewhere and is having no effect on the processes of the organization or the behaviors of the people in the organization. Remember this: it’s not what the mission is, it’s what the mission does. If you have a mission statement, maybe now is the time to dust it off and ask if it is doing anything. Or, put differently, is it inspiring any doing.
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7. If you realize that your organization is falling short when it comes to having a greater purpose, then it is time to pick something and start pushing on it. So the action item in this case is to decide. What do you choose? What do you want to stand for? (Remember, the purpose doesn’t have to be necessarily charitable. For example, consider Google stated purpose to “Organize the World’s Information.”)
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8. How is your employee recruiting, selection, and training process going to change to support your bigger purpose?
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9. From a marketing perspective, does identifying a bigger purpose push you away from the cluttered middle and out toward the more distinguished edge? Can you leverage your newly surfaced purpose in a way that will make you less boring and less commoditized? As Andy Sernovitz said, “Advertising is the price of being boring.” Can you leverage your bigger purpose to be less boring?
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10. Once you stand for something bigger how are you going to prove to yourself and your employees that this is for real and not another round of lip-service?
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11. How are you going to show the world?

P.S. If you doubt that adding a sense of purpose can help you drive your business forward contemplate this: the book, The Purpose Driven Life, has sold 25 million copies and is the best-selling hardback book in American history, according to Publisher’s Weekly.

Photo Credit: seabed7

I haven’t seen the speaker evaluation data yet, but I’m 100% sure there are some people who thought my presentation last week at ISS in Las Vegas was a waste of time.

Here’s why.

Because I didn’t conclude every point with a step-by-step plan for what they should do tomorrow that is guaranteed to work with no additional thought.

Step-by-step is great for solving simple, straightforward, or linear problems.  But when you get into the deeper, more interesting, dare I say expert stuff, the more step-by-step let’s you down.

That’s why sales scripts, strictly adhered to, don’t work.

That’s why my self storage follow up workshop includes workbooks that help participants think through (for themselves) how they will implement the ideas in the workshop.

So often we read books, attend conferences, or read blog posts and then move on. Consume, consume, consume, but never really think hard about how to execute. Or what we just read means to us or our businesses.

It’s like standing in the shower and letting the water wash over you but never grabbing the soap or lathering up your head with shampoo. Sure, some of the stink will come off, but you won’t be happy with the results.

Would you be better off with more thinking, more experimenting, more practicing, more acting, and less consuming?

If you are a leader, how are you going to help your employees and coworkers engage with good ideas and adopt best practices?

A leader’s job is to create more leaders, not more followers.

Are you preparing your store managers for their next job? You know, the one that has even more responsibility and pays better than the job they are currently doing. Are you helping them grow?

Most of them are not going to be with you forever. Don’t you think they will be more engaged if you are helping them move forward?

Sure, you could just stay out of it.

Not do anything to hold them back, but not really do anything to move them forward either. The first does nothing and the second fosters enthusiasm, engagement, and loyalty.

What do you choose, and why?

This one goes out to amazing on-site property managers everywhere….

Your corporate office, or boss, or the owner of the property you work at might decide it is time to raise rental rates (either to some of your existing customers or by increasing the asking rates for prospective customers).

They may dictate the rate increases, but you are uniquely positioned to make rate increases worth it.

When it comes to prospective customers…You control the customer experience. You are the one who extends empathy. You are the one who makes the prospective customer feel comfortable storing at your location regardless of the cost.

When it comes to your current customers… You are the one who gives reasons for the rent increase. You, and the the most skilled of your peers, are the ones who are able to smooth things over with your customers. You are the one who can make sure that your customers are so satisfied with their experience that a small rent increase is hardly noticed.

Give yourself credit, you’re more powerful than you think.

P.S. If your boss forwards this to you, please take it as a compliment. It means he or she believes you are capable of making good things happen.

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This is the first post in a series I will publish over the next few weeks about creating a sales culture in your self storage business. These posts are probably most relevant to people who have responsibility for more than one location, like self storage owners, asset managers, directors of property management or operations, district managers, or directors of marketing and sales.

I know that many of my readers are store managers.  Although these posts aren’t directed specifically to you, I think you’ll find something of value here too.

Are You Addressing The Wrong Problem?

I talk to lots of self storage owners and operators who want their store managers to “lease more units” or “sell better” or “stop quoting the price up front” or “score well on their mystery shops”.  If this is you, I am also willing to bet that you have some sort of program (like a bonus program) to incentivize these outcomes.

The problem with this approach is that if you look carefully, you are trying to solve a skill problem with an incentive.  It won’t work.

Let’s take that line of thinking to an extreme to show how problematic it really is.  Let’s assume you were as rich as Bill Gates and could afford to give incentives that were beyond most people’s dreams.  Unfortunately, you are diagnosed with a brain tumor that will be fatal if not operated on.

Would you grab your co-worker and say, “I’ll give you fifty million dollars to operate on my brain.  I really want to make sure you do the best job possible”?

Of course not.

There is no amount of motivation that is going to endow your coworker with the skills to operate on your brain.  Motivation matters only if there is skill, otherwise you are just messing stuff up faster.

Your Manager Wants to Do A Good Job

What you need to accept is that the vast majority of people you hire already want to do a good job.  They want to be successful.  They want to please you and please the customer.

Rather than focusing on motivation, you will be better served by helping them build the skills they need for success through training and practice.

Fearing some confusion, let me clarify that my point isn’t that you should stop using a bonus program if you have one. My point is that you should stop trying to expect your managers to become more skilled just because you dangle a carrot.  When you are being slowed down because skills are lacking, then do something to help your managers learn AND practice the skills they need.

Sales Professionals Are The Wrong Comparison

Professional sales people have been paid on commission (the ultimate sales incentive) for a long time and they continue to be paid that way in many, many organizations.  One difference between them and your property manager is that these are professional sales people. In many cases they are hired specifically because they already have all the skills they need.  Furthermore, some of the most remarkable sales forces in history, like IBM and Xerox are not famous for their commission and bonus structures, but rather for the world class training they have developed for their employees.  One last significant difference is that in many commissioned sales positions the salesperson has a primary role in generating leads as well as selling to those leads.  From management’s perspective, they don’t necessarily need their sales people to sell better, they just want them to work harder (at lead generation).

You are not in the same position.  You are not dealing with career sales people (for the most part).  Furthermore, if you are successful, you are using the internet and other marketing channels to generate most of your leads rather than relying on your manager as the primary source.

In Conclusion

If you want to build a sales culture you need to help your store managers gain sales skills.  Simply working harder or trying harder isn’t going to get you the results you want.

Other  Posts In The Creating A Sales Culture Series

Focus On Behavior To Improve A Property Manager’s Selling Strength

Small Wins Lead To Selling Success

Storytelling – A Secret Weapon In Your Effort To Create A Sales Culture

6 Ways To Make Selling Practice Easy

If you manage the on-site staff at a self storage facility here are 3 metrics that help will help you manage more effectively and improve your selling efforts.

1. Gross phone leads over time

   Tracking phone leads over time has two benefits. First, it tells you how many times your on-site manager has had the opportunity to sell.  Second, when compared to the number of move-ins over time you get an idea of whether your manager is getting better or worse at selling your self storage spaces.

   Put a different way, it is your job to be provide the on-site manager with selling opportunities and to know when your marketing is falling short of expectations.  You have a general sense whether you are helping or hindering the sales effort simply by monitoring how many opportunities to sell you are delivering to your on-site manager.

   When you take your gross phone leads for each month divided by the move-ins for each month over period of time (six months or so) you can get an idea of whether your manager is getting any better at selling.  If she is getting better, the calls required per rental should drop over time.

2. Call Volume By Day

   If you have your full-time (and presumably more skilled) manager working Saturday and taking Sunday and Monday off you may be making a tactical mistake. My call tracking data consistently shows Mondays as a higher call volume day than Saturday.

   It’s true, Saturdays are busy.  However, if you look carefully I think you will find that there are fewer phone inquiries on Saturday and much of the activity is by people who called earlier in the week and are now moving in.  There is  also  more walk-in traffic.    Since it takes less skill to rent to a walk-in customer (when compared to a phone shopper) it is worth figuring out when prospects are calling and making sure you have your best sales person on the phone.

3. Missed Calls

   You are paying a lot of money to get your phone to ring, so you need to know how many calls you are missing.  If it’s only a call here or there, then you might be willing to leave things alone.  But my guess is that if you don’t have your own call center and you don’t use a roll-over call center (like PhoneSmart or XPS) you are probably missing more calls than you think.   Unless people have a super-compelling reason to choose you (and you probably haven’t given them one) they are undoubtedly hanging up on your voice mail greeting and moving on to the next facility that they find online.

   In my opinion, you have three ways to to handle this situation…

   1. Staff more heavily during your busier times. (A good start, but inefficient if you want to capture all of your calls)
   2. Use a roll-over call center like PhoneSmart or XPS.  (My recommended course of action if you don’t have your own call center)
   3. Create your own internal call center (This seems complicated to me, but honestly, I haven’t researched it carefully.  If you are an expert in this area, I’d love to read your comments.)
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   If you think your manager is catching every call, you are either crazy or your marketing is completely dead.  But don’t take my word for it.  Collect the data and see for yourself.  Do you know how many you are missing and when you are missing them?  You should.

The good news is that all of these metrics are easy to come by when you are using tracking numbers in your online and offline marketing material.  I don’t sell tracking numbers.  I just think you are a fool if you don’t use them.   Not only do tracking numbers give you useful data, they also help you train your managers to sell better – read about using tracking numbers in training here.

What other phone sales metrics do you find helpful?

Photo Credit: .A.A.

Do you require your managers to practice their sales techniques?  If you do (and you should) here’s an easy way to keep them accountable.

Listening to the practice calls will give you some insight into how your store managers approach their role as a sales professional.  It will also give you another opportunity to give your store managers feedback.  However, even if you don’t listen to every practice call, by simply having a system in place to keep your managers accountable for practicing you will greatly increase the likelihood that they actually follow through.

Simply require them to do the practicing over the phone and use one of your marketing tracking numbers that records the phone calls.  (You are using tracking numbers aren’t you?)

This is easy if you  are a multi-location operator.  Have one storage manager call another and they take turns playing the role of the customer and the self storage manager.

Even if you only have one location, you likely have more than one employee.  In that case, have the one playing the part of the customer step out of the office and call the office line from a cell phone.

Once they have made the practice call they can email you or their supervisor with a link to the call from within the call tracking system.  This can be done easily in every call tracking system I have tried as long as you give the store manager access to reviewing their own calls.  If you don’t, for whatever reason, give them access to their own recorded calls, then they can email you with the time and date of the call and you can look it up within the call tracking system yourself.

P.S. If you are new to the blog, in this post I make a case for why practice is necessary.

P.P.S.  If you need to get started tracking your inbound calls, I recommend CallSource for call tracking.  I have used five different call tracking services over the last four years, and CallSource is my favorite.  At some point I’ll do a comparative review of the call tracking services I’ve used, but for now, just take my word for it.  You can reach Teresa St. Pierre at (800) 495-8836.  Tell her I sent you and she’ll take good care of you.  (I’m not paid or endorsed by Callsource, I just like the service – just in case you were wondering.)

When trying to learn to work in new and better ways, a simple way to keep motivation high is to rack up small wins which give you immediate positive feedback.  Success is energizing.

Rather than focus your attention on getting the entire sales process dialed in, start with just one piece and work on that.  For example you might decide that as an organization you are going to focus for a specified period of time (say a week or two) on one small part of the sales process.

It is hard to sustain motivation for learning new and better ways to do things when you can’t really see your progress.  So why not stack the deck in your favor?

Eat a Single Pea

Rather than eat an entire meal, start with a single pea.

1. Eating a single pea seems so easy that resistance to trying fades away.
2. When you carefully choose an area to focus on, you’ll likely get an additional boost of enthusiasm from the Hawthorne effect. (People work harder/try harder when they think someone is watching or studying their progress).
3. Lastly,  it is easier to monitor and measure progress.  By lowering the level of complexity, the process of evaluation and monitoring can be performed on a self-review or peer-review basis.  Rather than trying to tease out and score the nuance of an entire call, managers can do self-evaluations or peer evaluations because they only need to listen for very specific behaviors.  By symbolically focusing on eating a single pea, much of the complexity intrinsic to evaluating a sales call evaporates.

Ideas for Focus Areas

Here are some ideas for areas you might choose to focus on…

• Making an invitation to come rent
• Highlighting a  benefit to go along with every property feature that is mentioned.
• Asking a few good discovery questions (something other than “What size are you looking for?” and/or “When do you need the storage space?”).
• Getting a name and phone number to facilitate follow-up.
• Using a price stall.
• Not quoting a discount up front (waiting until after an initial invitation to rent has been declined).
• You are smarter than me… what do you think would work?

How do you think you can use this idea of small wins to make progress in your sales effectiveness?  How about in other areas of your business?

Photo Credit: Scott Bond