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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
- Staff more heavily during your busier times. (A good start, but inefficient if you want to capture all of your calls)
- Use a roll-over call center like PhoneSmart or XPS. (My recommended course of action if you don’t have your own call center)
- 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.)
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.