Customer service is trained and ready to sell your roll-off service when they hear people say they need a “big thing” for a project.  They are quick to promote roll-off when someone is calling to ask about your weekly service, too.  Where are the luscious roll-off sales you enjoyed in years past?  The economy or the competition may have taken a toll, but maybe we have stopped looking for sales opportunities in less than obvious places.

Here are some easy things you can do to grow your roll-off sales now.

1. Have the CSRs tally the number of calls they receive in a day by category; new roll-off, new commercial, new residential, switch-out, service issue/complaint, billing, cancellation and other.  Have them do this for 3-5 days and look at your numbers.  I recently conducted an audit like this and found that 28% of the calls were for new sales opportunities where the CSRs had been effectively trained to promote other services.  55% of the customer calls were for things where we would not traditionally promote roll-off and they included switch-outs, service issues/complaints and billing questions or payment.  You need to have a strategy to promote roll-off for all types of customer calls.
2. Calls to switch out a container are generally quick and easy.  Consider asking your customers if they are working on any projects where they aren’t using you for roll-off now.  That would be very insightful and should prompt more conversation.  Create an incentive for those permanent roll-off customers who provide you with a referral.
3. When a customer is calling to discuss or pay a bill, the CSR should do a commercial on roll-off before the conversation ends.  If you are trying to build your e-mail addresses in the database, consider this approach, “Mr. Smith, we appreciate you as our customer and I would like to e-mail you a discount coupon towards our roll-off service.  May I have your e-mail address?”
4. Customers call about their service every day and sometimes there are simple solutions.  Why not promote roll-off at the end of those conversations?  For the more difficult service issue conversations, consider this approach, “Ms. Jones we appreciate your feedback and your willingness to work with us.  I would like to send you a discount coupon for our roll-off service as a thank you.  May I have your e-mail address?”
5. What your staff does with the lead information from these unclosed roll-off opportunities is important to growing roll-off sales.  Many CSRs say they keep notes in case the potential customer calls back.  What usually happens is the customer’s information gets buried under other stuff and it is rarely used to follow up.  Create an excel document that each CSR must complete daily that includes name, address, phone, e-mail, project and reason the sale wasn’t closed.  It only takes a few minutes in a day for them to complete something like this.  Tooty can help with scripting that addresses an objection to the sale which will help your staff develop more advanced selling skills. This excel document will make it easy to follow up on unclosed roll-off sales.  Did you know that about 30% of those you call back will go ahead and have you schedule delivery?
6. Outside sales people are often lax about promoting roll-off to their prospects.  Many don’t understand that a new business may need to do construction before they are ready to open the doors.  When working on retention, consider offering a discount coupon for future roll-off service as a thank you.

Your customer service department has the best opportunity to grow your roll-off sales numbers.  Invest in them, incentivize them and celebrate your improved sales numbers with them.