The Shadow Shopper Strikes Again!

Have you noticed your sales staffs sales approach is going over like a lead balloon? Then it is time to call on a shadow shopper. A shadow shopper will get them to sell snow to the Eskimos. Sorry, that is a little cliche. How about, a shadow shopper will get them to sell a pair of pliers to a lobster. That fact is even the best salespeople let their sales approach run dry every once in awhile. It is not that they let it run dry, it just happens from repetitiveness. A shadow shopper or secret shopper keeps the sales staff sharp because in the back of their mind they know at any moment someone may be judging their performance.

A shadow shopper puts salespeople through their paces. They walk into a retail store or a self storage facility and test the different abilities and skills of the sales staff. Only, a salesperson does not know he is being tested. In fact, he does not know that the person he thinks is an ordinary customer is really a shadow shopper. This is not meant to be sneaky like a hunter who sits in a tree stand. It is a method to capture the customers experience. And the only way this can be done is by pretending to be a customer. Hunters can hunt in different ways to achieve the same goal. Quality assurance agencies cannot. Using a shadow shopper is the only way to find out how a customer thinks and feels.

Once a shadow shopper completes the secret shopping or mystery shopping evaluation, he can do one of two things or both. Some shadow shoppers reveal their true identity and begin a training seminar. This is a chance for the salesperson to ask questions about his sales technique. The other option for the shadow shopper is to walk out of the retail store or self storage company with his true identity a mystery. Instead of training the salesperson on the spot, the secret shopper fills out a report and sends it to the store manager or property manager. Then they can use the report to take the appropriate action. A sales person does not know he was secret shopped by a shadow shopper until the evaluation is in the managers hand. The problem with this method is that the salesperson continues to use a flawed sales approach until the report arrives. Even then the salesperson has no way of recalling the sale because the shadow shopper remained in incognito. 

Many self storage businesses prefer the formal shadow shopper approach, especially when the shadow shoppers are highly trained. Some people write books on planting tulips. A shadow shopper writes training manuals. Okay, maybe they do not write the training manuals, but they follow the guidelines in the training manuals written by quality assurance agents. So not only does a shadow shopper think and act like a customer, he thinks and acts like a sales expert. So the feedback a shadow shopper offers to a salesperson is from the expectations of the storage business. And the salesperson gets the feedback on the spot so he can implement it into the very next sale.

So do not send your lame sales staff to the graveyard just yet. If you want to solve the mystery to their dryness, hire a shadow shopper to fish out their skills and to keep them in kicking shape like a soccer player.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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