Leading an Appointment Culture – Part 2

Leading an Appointment Culture – Part 2

TRANSCRIPT: If I’m an owner of a business and I’m trying to lead an appointment culture, I’ve already introduced my team into creating an appointment culture, now it’s time to lead it. There are four things that I want out of my managers. There are four things that I need to look for. Those are Leadership, Accountability, Consistency and Active Activity Management.

Now, what do I mean by those four? Well, leadership is simple. Leadership is getting people to want to do the things that we need them to do, and we’ll get to how to do that in just a minute. That’s the key to leadership. Leadership is not being a boss and telling people what to do; leadership is getting people to want to do those things we need them to do.

Another thing I need from my managers is accountability. See, they have to have consequences to the actions that their team takes. They have to hold people accountable. But, it’s not all bad. True accountability is just helping people improve for the next time and I need to see that from my managers.

I also need to see consistency without question. If we have a rule that says, for example, if you miss two calls from the day before, you don’t get to catch UP’s today, and our top guy missed two calls yesterday and he worked yesterday, then we’ve got to be consistent and we have to tell that salesperson, “Hey, Bob, sorry, you don’t get to catch any UP’s today. I know it doesn’t feel right but you’re going to work the phones all day. And, perhaps, tonight, before you go home, you’ll make sure all your activities are done.” See, that’s consistency and you have to have that kind of consistency, without question.

The last thing I’m looking for from my managers is something called Active Activity Management. See, they need to manage the activities of their salespeople. They need to manage the activities of their team, because, remember, if we take care of the activities, the results will come. But, it’s more than that; they have to actively manage them. This means more than just looking at the CRM tool at the end of the day and seeing that Bob made all of his calls. Remember, I told you, Bob can fake these. He can make ‘clicks’ all day and say he made calls.

The active activity management means walking around the dealership, walking up to Bob, your top salesperson, and asking him if he made all his calls. Invariably, Bob will say, “I sure did, boss”. Active activity management is adding two words to their dialogue and those two words are “show me”. “Show me that you’ve got all your calls done”, right? “Show me how many appointments you have set for tomorrow”. Let’s look at the notes in the CRM. Let’s listen to the calls. I’m hopeful that your team’s calls are all being recorded and that those recorded calls are attached to the CRM.

We’ll talk about that later but those are the four things that I want to see out of my managers. I need to see this leadership. I need to see that they are holding people accountable. I need to see that they are being consistent day in and day out. More than anything else, they’ve got to be managing the activities and they have to be doing it in an active fashion.