Happy’s Home Centers’ Chris Kale Jr. offers helpful hints for embracing the new digital marketplace and closing in on web leads – beginning with a simple call
“There are a ton of leads out there. And it takes all the little leads you take in from everywhere to generate enough sales to make a business thrive.”
When a participant at Chris Kale Jr.’s RTO World 2023 education session made this comment, Kale quickly affirmed, “That’s exactly right. That’s the point exactly.”
Kale’s presentation, plainly titled Sales 2.0, promised to answer the proverbial question “Where did all the rents go?” It delivered that and more, ending up as the highest-rated education session at rent-to-own’s biggest event of the year.
Kale began by illustrating how the origins of sales leads have shifted since 2010 – the year Kale founded Happy’s Home Centers, Inc. with his father, RTO veteran Chris Kale Sr., and uncle, Rick Kale. Today, Kale Jr. oversees operations for 12 Happy’s locations in Tampa, Florida.
“In 2010, the rental world was different,” Kale began. “There are three ways folks can reach a store: by car, by phone, or by computer. In 2010, almost all of our deals were coming to us by car, through in-person visits to our store to shop. A few years later, about a third of our deals were coming to us by phone – people just called us, rather than driving all the way over to buy from us. And we had to get better at phone sales. Then, more customers were calling than coming into the store, and online got into the mix. And then, the pandemic hit and fast-forwarded the takeover of internet deals.”
With the onslaught of COVID-19, in-store visits disappeared, and online shopping skyrocketed. Today, Kale estimates about two-thirds of Happy’s deals are initiated on the company’s website, a third still come in via phone, and almost none are originated through store visits.
“And that’s OK,” insists Kale. “It’s the same amount of traffic; it’s just switched lanes. The demand for our business is still there, but it’s coming from different angles, so we’ve got to master the new angles. Rental dealers today must always be watching for what’s changing, both on the internet and in consumer behavior.
“We know all the traffic’s going online,” he continues. “We can either resist it and keep on trying to drive customers to our store, or we can embrace it and work to drive up our online traffic. At Happy’s, we treat all information coming in from our website as a lead – a lead we record, put into a system, and follow up on. Because leads – all leads – are money.”
Defining a web lead as having a customer’s name and number, Kale went on to outline several recommendations for rental dealers to modernize their sales approach and treat web leads as the valuable resource they have become.
1. Reframe mindsets.
The first step to succeeding at Sales 2.0 is to ensure you’ve got Salespeople 2.0, too – which begins with helping your sales team think differently about web leads.
“Your ‘new’ salespeople wear a headset and hang out in the back of your store,” suggests Kale. “If Karen comes in as a lead through your website, then your team automatically knows a few things about her: They know she got an ad, a direct mailer, a door hanger from your store, or she googled ‘I want to rent some stuff;’ they also know Karen lives close by, because you target your marketing close to your store; and they know she wants to rent something right now, because she was just on your site in the past hour. Maybe she clicked on something that tells you the product she’s interested in, maybe not – but we know she’s not trying to order a pizza. Once you begin to use this mindset, it changes how you approach web leads.”
While this mind-frame is new, the sales tactics that succeed remain the same. Superior sales staff still need to be confident, focused, optimistic, driven, self-motivated, and excellent at dealing with rejection, and building a relationship is still the name of the game.
“Our top digital salesperson has 30 years of rent-to-own experience, and is closing 50 percent of his web leads,” Kale attests. “He’s using relational sales tactics in an online medium. He’s not spamming out text messages and waiting for people to reply; he’s following up with a call and saying, ‘Hey, Rick, I saw you were on our website checking out a washer and dryer; let me get them to you today.’ He’s making sure the experience is warm and personalized – much like what they might encounter in the store.”
2.Respond rapidly.
“Speed to lead,” recommends Kale. “We have to get to web leads as fast as humanly possible. Site visitors have likely also gone onto a few other competitor sites and browsed around, so if Karen put her info into your website at 2:00 p.m., you’re now in a footrace to be the first one to get to her. If you can win that race, then you’ll close way more leads.”
Kale suggests a standard response time, during business hours, should be within an hour; if the lead comes in after hours, follow-up should happen within the first hour of business the next business day.
“The best-case scenario is that you contact Karen while she’s still on our site, you overcome whatever objections she might have, and you close the deal then and there – and now it’s traditional RTO sales again,” Kale concludes.
3.Call first.
“When following up a web lead, make a call – don’t send a text,” insists Kale. “It’s an incredibly important distinction. All of our salespeople who call first have much higher close rates than folks who text first.”
Kale notes that objections can be overcome more easily during a conversation voce-a voce than in a text exchange, and ghosting is improbable.
“Our top person just says, ‘Hey, it’s Chris at Happy’s. I saw you were just on our site; is there anything I can help you with?’” Kale explains. “If the customer says nothing, then he sends them a follow-up text, and continues to call them daily. If they show a clear preference for texting, then of course you text, but we always begin with a phone call.”
4.Be prepared.
Kale says using scripts for your fast, friendly, follow-up phone calls isn’t just OK – he urges it.
“You can’t just wing it; you don’t want to be making it up as you go along,” he affirms. “When you pick up the phone to call, you should have a game plan regarding what you’re going to say. Make it your own, put your own language around it; you don’t want to be a robot. But pros use scripts – and you’ll want to have different scripts for different scenarios.”
Kale reiterates that the top goal for that first call should be to close the deal with no follow-up necessary. If that’s impossible, then be sure to gather customer information – including why they don’t feel ready to close just yet – and schedule a follow-up call with them.
5.Sell backwards.
Kale calls his top tip “selling upside-down,” because it turns the traditional rent-to-own sales process on its head. For years, RTO salespeople have 1) completed the order form; 2) verified the customer information; 3) secured the down-payment; and 4) scheduled the delivery. But to achieve Sales 2.0 level at your store, says Kale, you’ve got to turn it around.
“You begin with step four – schedule the delivery,” explains Kale. “You can check their ZIP code to make sure they’re in your market. Then you secure the down-payment, and gather and verify their information. Today’s customers don’t want to jump through approval hoops before they know whether they’re getting the product. Selling upside-down gives them the security they require to follow through.
“Teach your sales staff to sell upside-down, and it will send your close rate through the roof,” Kale concludes. “If you do nothing else different, do this. It will make a dramatic difference in your store’s close rate.”
4.Be persistent.
As with any sales situation, polite persistence tends to pay off.
“When customers have a need, they’re going to go to the person who has been reaching out to them on the regular,” counsels Kale. “They’re not going to go with the company that put in one call that the customer might not even know they got because it was from a number they didn’t recognize.”
Kale also notes that salespeople must have clear and measurable guidelines to help them meet or exceed sales goals.
“Do you know what your desired web-lead close rate is? Do you know how long it should be between a customer submitting a web lead and someone from your store giving them that first call?” Kale inquires. “At Happy’s, web-lead contact means a call and an email day one, followed up by a text every day. If the customer submitted a coupon or other code, then we follow up for three days. If they showed us what product they want, then we follow up for ten days. And we vary the time of day we contact them, to make sure we’re not hitting them at a bad time of day over and over.”
7.Go beyond.
Finally, Kale advises offering the highest, most personalized level of service possible – which has always been and will forever be a great idea. But Kale believes it’s more important than ever in today’s expanding payment-options landscape.
“There’s a lot more competition out there than there used to be in terms of payment-plan options for customers,” notes Kale. “Today, customers have many other avenues they can use to scratch their shopping itch. So if we don’t treat them with first-class, concierge-level service, then they can easily exercise one of those alternatives.”
The bottom line, according to Kale, is that in this new digital era, sales “should never be slow. It’s up to us to dictate the pace and attack these web leads – that is what’s going to create rentals and help grow our business.”
