One of the things I will touch on in the self storage blog is self storage trends. Since our call center has been applying its sales techniques to the storage business, we have learned a lot about demand patterns. On Monday the 28th of March there will be several demand increasing events occuring at the same time. Almost all the self storage facilities in the 50 states will be closed Easter Sunday. It is also one of the only four days of the year that PhoneSmart is closed. This means a lot of people will need to take care of their storage needs on Monday. It is also the last Monday of a month, which is always busy. And it is the last Monday of March, which can surprise some people.

The end of March is the start of busy season.You may have seen a nice build up in demand these last two weeks. Even so, people are often surprised when March goes out like a Lion as far as storage demand is concerned. All of our sales reps are eager to get to work on Monday. They know we will be booking a lot of units for our clients’ stores next week.

So if you want to beat everyone else to a few customers, you should be open Easter Sunday and open early and stay late on Monday the 28th.
Bye for now, Tron.

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One thing we deal with a lot at PhoneSmart is the potential customer at your gate after you have already closed the office. Some of our clients have an on-call staff person who can meet these after-hours rentals and get them signed up. Other clients never do after-hours rentals. Either way is fine with us as long as we know what to tell people. Sometimes we can take a reservation for that after hours person and have them come back in the morning to rent. Other times we have to tell them “Too bad, so sad” in as nice a way as possible. I know some operators are trying to automate the whole move-in process so people can take care of themselves. This is great, except your lawyer would tell you that you need a clean lease and you need to have checked ID before allowing someone to put their stuff in your place. So how do you handle the after-hours rentals? What works best for you? It does make sense to have someone available for after-hours rentals, because the value of an extra rental might be $500- $1,500 on average depending on your market. Bye for now, Tron.

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A lot of people were very interested in the results of the market survey that the self storage association recently commissioned. I picked up on a few items at the Philadelphia show. One thing that many people talked about was the finding that only 25% of renters found out about their storage place through the phone book. Our clients have been telling us for quite some time that drive-up business is becoming more and more important. This hammers home the adage that real estate is all about location, location and location. But the study did not ask if renters called first before going to the store or where they got the phone number if they did call first. These are important things to know before you start cutting back your phone book presence.

Another interesting finding was that pet control and expanded access hours were two of the most important reasons people choose storage. I ran this by a few of our experienced sales reps who talk to 100 people a day about storage. They scoffed. As a matter of policy, we do not talk about pest control unless a callers bring it up, because we do not want to suggest that pests may threaten their belonings. Very, very few people ever ask about it. As far as acess hours, you can sell 24 hour access successfully and you can sell limited access successfully. We sell whatever the store offers, and it almost always works. So expanded hours is probably not the great attractor that it might seem from the study. Let me know what you read into the study and what you have found from other market surveys. Tune in next time. Bye for now, Tron.

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I am reading parts of the SSA market survey and hope to report our reactions to the questions and answers.

bye for now, Tron

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I am thinking a lot about follow-ups today. I have many people to call back from the Las Vegas and Philadelphia conferences. And I spent a little time today listening to some of the follow-up work our call center reps are doing for our self storage clients. We are calling back leads and reservations for a few of our client stores to see if we can drive the conversion rates a little higher. You can tell when a client is really understanding the value of an extra rental, when they hire us to make follow-up calls. It takes time to do. You get answering machines and busy signals a lot. But you also find that since the prospect’s initial conversation with us, they have settled enough issues to be able to decide to rent on the follow-up call. So the lesson for storage owners and managers is to pursue each lead quickly and diligently.

Our call volume is cooperating nicely with our projections. Yesterday was one of the best days of the year. We will start seeing record breaking year to date call volume each Monday from here on. The percentage of reservations to calls is growing as well. The rental season is here.
Tune in next time. Bye for now, Tron

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I had a great week last week at the self storage association meeting. We got to see a lot of current clients and made some great contacts for future clients.

I hope you will enjoy looking at my self-storage blog in the weeks to come. It will give me a chance to share with you impressions and reactions as they happen. I am fortunate to have a lot of friends, acquaintances and clients who are storage insiders. Between their feedback and what we see every day from the phone calls we answer, we have developed an interesting window on the business.

The host hotel was well set up for an association meeting last week. Almost everyone stayed at the host hotel and when I walked slowly enough through the halls, I bumped into all kinds of people I wanted to see. I read in the SSA Monday News that there were 1400 in attendance. I think I talked to almost all of them.

We had a good turn out at my Selling Self-Storage Seminar on Wednesday. It was the first one of these I have done in conjucntion with a national event where all attendees were PhoneSmart customers. That allowed us to talk about many ways that PhoneSmart call center reps and store staff can work together to rent to more people.
We had some very good sales people at the seminar, so we could talk about more advanced sales techniques. We did our seminar in a Hotel that was created in Philadelphia’s first skyscraper, the PFSF building, which went up in 1932.

The trade show was great, too. DJ Johnson, one of our great call center reps, helped work the booth. We talked to a lot of current clients. It is very rewarding to hear the success stories people share about the call center and our secret shoppng service. We created quite a few promising prospects for new business, too. It will be fun to watch them go throuigh the process of implementing our solutions and reporting back to us with their success stories at a future trade show. We are lucky to be in a service business that is so helpful and so profitable to our clients.

I found the conference sessions interesting. The SSA is trying to become a leader and authority in self storage marketing, operations and advocacy in a more sophisticated way than in the past. I find it to be encouraging, although some people will be uncomfortable until they see how things develop. The studies in consumer habits and operational and financial characteristics seemed well crafted and of great value. The more our clients and prospects learn about their business, the more they can see the value we create for them.

I had a fun breakfast while in Philly. My childhood friend from grade school lives in Philadelphia. I hadn’t seen him since graduating high school. It turned out he works in a building about three blocks form the host hotel. It was fun to get caught up with him.

It was great to get home from my trip, too. It takes your family a little while to adjust after you get home from being gone for a week. I am glad I am not on the road every week.

I was also very pleased that it took me just a couple of hours to get caught up after getting in the office this morning. The people who help me run PhoneSmart do a great job taking care of business, so I can go out and see clients and create new clients.

The call volume is looking good today as we expected it might. We have had several good spurts so far.

Here is a reminder for you for next year. We had forgotten how many people tune in to the March Madness Basketball games. We were looking at call volume for Saturday the 19th and were at first puzzled at how slow it was in comparison to trends. But it was a big basketball day and many people were watching their favorite teams play hoops. Wait until next Monday. You will like how busy it will get.

Tune in next time for more words from the world of storage blogs. Bye for now, Tron.

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Currently there is an association meeting in progress. We will keep you up to date.

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It is a great pleasure to introduce the first self storage related blog. We will do our best to keep you up to date with practices, trends and developments. Please vistit us everyday.

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This is the first entry of its kind. More to come.

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