Creative Sales Ideas Means More Adoptions from What Would Mike Say? on Vimeo.
If we think about pet adoption like a business, we discovery that professional AND creative sales techniques will mean more lives saved. In this blog, Mike explains a few of his professional sales ideas that are also a little ‘out of the box!’
Do you collect information from families adopting? Do you know why they are coming in to adopt on any particular day? Do you teach your staff customer service techniques? Did you know there are ways to train your staff in customer relations… for free?
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When I talk about running our organizations like a business, we’re in the ‘business of saving lives,’ so what I have done all my life is I learn from others.
Adoptions are Sales. We want to save lives and we want to increase those adoptions.
Sign-in Sheets
Do you have people register when they walk into your organization? And if you don’t, you should. You want to have a form that asks people:
- What brought you in today?
- Are you here to adopt?
- What made you decide that today’s the day you want to adopt? Did you read something, see something, hear something?
This is Knowledge; this is knowledge to help you increase adoptions.
On those sign-in sheets you should also include a place that asks for the individual’s email address. Ask them if they would like to learn more about your organization through emails and success stories. This will help you in putting-together a bigger donor base for your organization. These people were actually at your facility, saw what you were doing for orphaned pets, and they can become ambassadors of your organization.
Exit Interviews For Potential Adopters
At the end of the day you need to look at the number of families who came into your facility looking to adopt, and how many actually did adopt. Let’s assume you had fifty families come in today, but you did two adoptions. Do you think that’s a very low percentage? When you see a pattern of these things then you need to stop, put together a questionnaire, and do exit interviews.
Get some volunteers together, work with them and teach them, and have them stop families leaving without adopting a pet, and ask them why they are leaving without a pet. Did they not see what they were looking for? Were they treated inappropriately? Did something happen that made them leave? This is vast knowledge that helps you in doing a better job in Customer Relations.
Customer Relations
Our staff, in all of our organizations, are trained to properly care for pets: how to disinfect kennels, how to properly feed, how to groom and brush pets, etc. And that’s all great! But where we’re lacking is Customer Service. That is how to approach potential adopters, how to treat them, how to close a sale.
