Three factors have pushed us to train our employees more effectively.
- The self storage business is becoming increasingly more competitive.
- We are buying properties with a value-add strategy and that means we need excellent execution at the operational level.
- Our portfolio is spread out geographically which means we need managers who can be effective without a lot of continual hand holding because it is difficult to visit all of our locations as often as we would if they were all concentrated in one metro area.
Although we don't have it down yet, here are some of the things we are learning as we have been training our employees to be more effective converting phone inquiries to store visits and rentals.
- Training in a teleconference environment is difficult, but it is better than nothing. You have no idea who is engaged and who is falling asleep.
- It is more effective to follow up any teleconference training with some written materials that outline everything covered while on the phone. It is likely that the people working behind the counter at a storage facility were not good students when they were school age. They are probably not taking notes, and if they are they may have messed them up.
- Record the teleconference/webinar and let the participants watch or listen to it again. If you are interesting and dynamic enough in your training that they listen to you again you should take it as a compliment.
- Follow up relentlessly with activities that reinforce the learning and force the participants to apply their newly acquired knowledge.
We have our on-site managers review and critique their own "secret shopper" calls. In addition, they listen to the calls of their colleagues and vote for the best one. We are starting to record live calls so that our employees can listen to themselves interact with real live prospects, not mystery shoppers. - Make the follow-up learning/application activities as fun as possible.
If you can't make it fun, at least make it so obviously relevant to their job performance that the participants want to engage in the activities. So far we've made it a contest with a prize awarded by the voting of their peers and a second "editors choice" award decided by me so that I can point out calls that have an excellent section that can be used to illustrate one of the sales strategies covered in the training. We need to get more creative in this regard. - Once you train your staff and begin monitoring how well they perform the new behaviors, you will quickly realize that some are catching on much much more quickly than others, others improve slowly, and a small group makes almost no improvement at all.
- The ones catching on the fastest need more attention and coaching, not less. Eventually they can help the middling group.
- The ones who are making no progress probably have an attitude problem. If you care about the behavior enough that you are taking the time to train and monitor, then you should consider replacing these people or changing their role.
- Your employees with positive attitudes will be grateful that you are helping them do their job better and you will improve their commitment and loyalty to your company.
- Training allows you to hold your employees to a higher level of accountability because you are taking away excuses for poor performance.
- Training is also a tool to help build camaraderie among employees who rarely interact, because through the training they have some shared history.
- It's not all about the phone, they need training on how to handle email inquiries as well.
- I wish we started sooner.
