Use This Strategy To Ensure That Your Team Is Always Busy
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As a service business owner, there’s nothing worse than having an unproductive team. You want them to be busy going from one call to the next. Every moment that they’re not on the road, you’re paying them but not producing income from them.
In this article, you’ll read about a powerful strategy to end the inactivity and create so much work for all of your team that you my even need to hire more people.
The Big Idea
At a high level, the strategy works like this: build an outbound call team that calls people and schedules work. The target is to fill the next three days on a rolling basis.
This is a powerful strategy because you can increase your outbound calls or decrease them, depending on how busy it is in your business. If you have a really busy period at a certain time of the year, you can pull back on your outbound calls; if you have a slow period, you can make more calls. As a result, you’ll end up ensuring that all of your team is busy all of the time.
Now here’s how to implement it…
What You’ll Need
You’ll need a “call board” – a board that outlines the available time slots over the next three days. As bookings come in (either from your inbound call team or your outbound call team) you’ll fill up the available slots. Make sure there are enough available slots for every employee on the road every day. (Make adjustments throughout the week if an employee is away).
You’ll need an outbound call team. If you’re just starting out, you might have a couple of employees do this part time, although you may eventually want to bring in one or more full-time people making outbound calls all day long.
You’ll need a list of prospective customers whose phone numbers you’ve received through your marketing efforts, and a list of past customers’ phone numbers and what work you’ve had completed for them.
You’ll also need a reason for a call. You may not want to call “out of the blue” and ask for an appointment. Rather, you should have a reason. For example:
- A special: You have a special on a certain service
- A seasonal reason: The season is about to change and you are advising all the people in the area to prepare for the season (i.e. a winter package or a summer package, etc.)
- A related purchase: You recently performed work for them and you wanted to follow up and see how the work was and to recommend some related service that others have bought when they had the same work done
Put The Pieces Together
Each day, your outbound call team will sit down and start dialing. These aren’t cold calls because you’ve connected with these potential customers (through marketing or because you have served them in the past). Your call team will connect with these people and give them a reason to schedule an appointment. When the customer agrees to an appointment, it goes on the call board. The board will fill up and your team will be busy.
It might take some experience to perfect this strategy (since there is always a balance between a team that is not busy enough and too busy) but this is a very effective strategy to ensure that your team is on the road all the time.
Use this simple strategy to optimize your team’s productivity and you will see your profitability grow. You may even need to add people to your team sooner than you think.
- Use This Strategy To Ensure That Your Team Is Always Busy - August 23, 2016
- 5 Ways To Build A Team That Will Accelerate Your Success - July 5, 2016
- Here’s Why Your Team Doesn’t Seem Motivated - March 8, 2016
Posted In: Management
