Who is selling?

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Someone calls you up on the phone and says, “How late are you open today?” If your response to that is not something like, “What time did you want to come in to rent a storage unit,” you’re sunk. If your response is, “Oh, we’re open until six. See you later!” and you hang up, you will fail in your efforts to build a selling culture.

The next killer phrase is, “That’s a little more than I’m looking to spend.” The whole issue of price is like a poker game. When people tell you, “Oh, that’s a little more than I’m looking to spend,” they’re looking to see if they can negotiate pricing with you. They’re looking to see if you have confidence in your pricing. Because if you don’t have confidence in your pricing, then they will think you’re charging too much and ripping them off. So this whole issue of pricing is all a poker game. When someone says, “Oh, that’s a little more than I’m looking to spend,” if you go, “Oh, sorry the price is kind of high I guess,” you’re sunk! How your people answer the price concern also determines whether you rent to enough people in the could-go-either-way category.

If the people you hire are able to deal with these killer phrases on a busy day when they’re tired and short staffed, you’ve got the right people.

We can use PhoneSmart as a case study for a moment. We use the voicemail message for prospective hires with great success. When someone calls in off of a help-wanted ad, we’ve set up a greeting that tells a lot about what we do, a lot about what we’re looking for, and it invites callers to tell about themselves. When listening to the callers on the employment hot-line, we usually give them about five or ten seconds. If you can hear them smiling, if they’re having fun with it – because a lot of times, it’s embarrassing for them, then we keep listening. They don’t realize that when they call you, they’re doing an audio audition until they get the message. So you get some fun stuff. It will catch some people off guard and you can hear how well they are at recovery. If we like what we hear, we save the message and call them back to set up a telephone interview.

It is interesting that sometimes when you call the people back who sounded great on the message, they answer their phone at the house, “What?” We are quick to say, “Oops! Sorry!” and get off the phone. When you call the people back you catch them being themselves and can hear if they have good speaking skills, if they can think on their feet and if they can improvise. Those are all fantastic talents to have in a new staff person.

One of the other things that’s so important is the tendency of your people to be patient and friendly, because when it’s slow at your store, anybody could handle the customers. No problem. But when it gets busy, can your staff people maintain their composure and act in a friendly and professional way with everyone. You do experience very slow times and very busy times at your stores. We see this in our call volume reports. No one in the whole country wants to rent a storage unit for one or two hours, and then everybody in the country wants one at the same time. You get that at your store, too. You’ll sit there with your chin in your hand for a while, like the Maytag man, and then all of a sudden you’ve got five people at the counter and the phone won’t stop ringing. So how do you test to see if prospective hires can stay friendly and patient in a pinch like this?

One of the tests that we’ve come up with to test for composure and patience is what we call “The Break Room Test.” When someone comes in for a live interview, we sit them in the break room for a minute and say, “I’m sorry, the person who’s interviewing you is just running a little bit late. She’ll be right there,” and then we’ll leave the person in there for five or ten minutes. One of the staff people will walk through and just in passing say, “Hello,” and if the interview doesn’t respond in a friendly way, that’s a short interview. If the person in the break room starts getting impatient and annoyed, that’s a short interview. We leave some reading materials about our company and about storage in the break room. If the person being tested leafs through the material, then we feel good about their curiosity and their ability to use down time to learn something they might need. I can’t tell you how many problems we’ve saved ourselves from a bad hire by doing this. You might agree a lot of people interview very well, and then after you’ve had them on staff for a couple of weeks, you think it’s a different person or sometimes even their evil twin working for you. So this is a way that you can find people that are patient and friendly even in a pinch.

Put yourself in your candidate’s position. Job interviews stink! They’re terrible to go to because you never know what the people doing the hiring are looking for. You are worried if they like you or don’t like you. It’s a great pressurized situation to see if people can maintain their friendliness and patience under stress.

In the positions you fill and the positions we fill, people have to use computers and phones. So we run them through a little test to make sure they can talk, type, and read at the same time. You might think that everyone can do basic keyboarding, manage basic software and use a piece of telephone equipment. But not everyone can. You need to know that you have people at the store than can run your management software and can fix the gate interface when it’s down and know how to roll up a door without jamming it. So you have some things you need to test for, too.

Of course, you have to test for selling skills. Hopefully you have recognized some good selling and questioning skills in the phone interview. But you need to know the prospective hire can sell your products and services. The oldest, silliest, but still effective way of testing someone’s selling skills is to grab the thing nearest to you and ask them to sell it to you. “Okay, why don’t you just sell me this box of Tic Tacs.” Or “How would you sell me this pen?” You put people in a terribly uncomfortable spot, and you’ll see how they sell under pressure. What you’ll find is there are a lot of people that have some great natural selling skills, and they’ll start asking you questions and trying to determine how best to approach you. When they do that, you’ve got somebody you can work with. And then there are some people who have backward selling skills who think what they have to do to sell to you is to hit you over the head with what ever they are selling. “These are great Tic Tacs. You need them. You should buy them.” That’s probably not the approach you want. These are just a few of the many great hoops you can make people jump through.

And, of course, seeing is believing. I definitely recommend if you’re not doing it now, hire people on a probationary period. Use them on a temporary project. Hire them on a test basis. See what happens. Give them a chance to get a feel for your organization, because being in the storage business is not for everyone. Being a retail salesperson is not for everyone. Storage managers have to wear a lot of hats. They’ve got to be good at a lot of things. They’ve got to be good at selling, they’ve got to be good at collecting, they’ve got to be good at operating the facility, and they’ve got to be good at cleaning. There are a lot of things they’ve got to be good at. Just because someone’s good at one or two things doesn’t mean they’re good at enough of them that you want to keep them on staff. So set a temporary assignment with them or start them part-time.

Give them increasing responsibility as they pass the day to day tests. Bring them on slowly so you don’t overwhelm them in the beginning, because no matter what your new position is, it’s overwhelming in the beginning. Usually at the end of the first week, the people are in a fog, and you need to give them a day or two to settle down from that. Starting slow also allows you to avoid committing to something that you’re going to need to wiggle out of later. It is better to have a set probationary period, so if the hire does no

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