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.)
